Quotes About Plot

Plot grows out of character. If you focus on who the people in your story are, if you sit and write about two people you know and are getting to know better day by day, something is bound to happen. Characters should not, conversely, serve as pawns for some plot you've dreamed up. Any plot you impose on your characters will be onomatopoetic: PLOT.

The development of relationship creates plot.

In good fiction, we have one eye on the hero or the good guys and a fascinated eye on the bad guys, who may be a lot more interesting. The plot leads all of these people (and us) into dark woods where we find, against all odds, a woman or a man with the compass, and it still points true north. That's the miracle, and it's astonishing. This shaft of light, sometimes only a glimmer, both defines and thwarts the darkness.

she uses a formula when writing a short story, which goes ABDCE, for Action, Background, Development, Climax, and Ending.

And yet still she watched him... he wondered why. One possibility, and by far his favorite, was that she was planning his murder.

Revenge was a dish best served cold.

If disliking Richard be grounds for accusing a man of conspiracy, I daresay you could implicate half of Christendom in this so-called plot. Richard endears himself easiest to those who've yet to meet him.

It almost seems as though some very intentional, finely tuned plot against us intends to rob us of who we are in Christ.

Michael Koryta is an amazingly talented writer, and I rank The Prophet as one of the sharpest and superbly plotted crime novels I've read in my life.

I don't like novels that tie everything up in a plot-y way. I always think that's not really true of life, particularly of people in power.

From beginning to end Wilde performed his life and continued to do so even after fame had taken the plot out of his own hands.

The general plot of life is sometimes shaped by the different ways genuine intelligence combines with equally genuine ignorance.

A life without purpose is like a novel without a plot. It wanders all over the place, is hard to follow, and in the end, doesn't get particularly good reviews.

The high office of the President has been used to foment a plot to destroy the American's freedom and before I leave office, I must inform the citizen of this plight.

Morton and the rest of the conspirators, around eighty in all, came up the main staircase

I began to write fiction on the assumption that the true enemies of the novel were plot, character, setting and theme, and having once abandoned these familiar ways of thinking about fiction, totality of vision or structure was really all that remained.

I began to write fiction on the assumption that the true enemies of the novel were plot, character, setting and theme.

He's setting you up, Jenny. Damn. Has set you up.

Perhaps if we could sort one plot from another we would stand half a chance of averting them, but they're interwined as nettles, my friend.

A plan was forming in her mind. She didn't look at the idea too closely, lest she startle it away.

The bipeds plot. Clever, delicious bipeds, random and amusing. They are eager for change, ravenous for it, for the antithesis of Consent.

Conflict is the essence of drama.

Plot might seem to be a matter of choice. It is not. The particular plot is something the novelist is driven to: it is what is left after the whittling-away of alternatives.' Elizabeth Bowen opened her Notes on Writing a Novel (1945, reprinted in Collected Impressions, Longmans, Green & Co.

I was immensely moved by this novel when I read it recently and yet I cannot think of anything to say about it except that it is wonderful. The people are not characters, there is no plot in the usual sense. What can you bring to bear: verisimilitude — to what? You can merely say over and over that it is very good, very beautiful, that when you were reading it you were happy.