Quotes About Plot

Spoilers are inevitable.

Choosing location is integral to the film: in essence, another character.

I'm first and foremost interested in the story, the characters.

It's always the story that interests me.

I think that internal conflict works very well, because, after all, all the best drama is fuelled by conflict.

Some of the vamps formed into smaller groups, to chat or plot or whatever vamps did at undead nonfunerals. Oddly, they talked about the stock market and the latest flare-up in the Middle East, like any well-educated group of humans. It was almost as disorienting as hearing them quote Jesus. Then,

Usually plot is to fiction what form is to poetry. It lifts and fills the rambling language and presses it down into a single shape and sound. (85)

To me, it all comes down to things being character-driven. It's hard for me to look beyond that. CG and all this cool stuff - so be it. But to me, it pretty much begins and ends with character-driven plots rather than technologically-driven plots.

Ofrece lo mismo tu premisa? El planteamiento que me presentas de tu comedia o de tu drama, ¿hace que se desboque mi imaginación previendo hacia dónde puede derivar la historia? Si no es así, aún no tienes premisa.

Plot joined the expedition unwooed, as a necessary companion. It was not the scout. The scout was a certain mood. I followed that mood, and let the shape of the story flow from that.

The novel must tell a story.

Oh dear me, yes. The novel must tell a story.

According to Chekhov, Tamaru said, rising from his chair, once a gun appears in a story, it has to be fired. Meaning what? Meaning, don't bring unnecessary props into a story. If a pistol appears, it has to be fired at some point. Chekhov liked to write stories that did away with all useless ornamentation.

While I was writing 'Elizabeth Is Missing' and struggling with the intricacies of the plot, I told myself the next book would be really simple and linear, and I'd have it all worked out before I set down a single word.

Writers often like to talk about how intuitive the writing process is, but in truth, building a book is a remarkably unintuitive task. Or, to put it more accurately, you need a lot more than intuition. You need plot and characters. You need a setting. You need a theme that is relevant and supported by your text.

When you are a sentence-based writer, they have to be good. They have to be really on the spot. Because when you don't have a plot, really, what shall you rely on? Just language. And sometimes I am so afraid of writing the wrong thing, I just sit and wait for the right thing to come.

Back in my 20s, when I wrote 'A Place of Greater Safety,' the French Revolution novel, I thought, 'I'll always have to write historical novels because I can't do plots.' But in the six years of writing that novel, I actually learned to write, to invent things.

I wrote four novels under the name Amy Silver. The first one was commissioned, and I was given basically the whole plot and the characters. They told me what to do, and I went straight away and did it. After that, I continued, and I was coming up with more my own ideas, although they did steer me.

You have to think about the WWE as soap operas.

Plot is a framework on which to drape other things. So once that's working, I can just let it go and do all the stuff that I love - 'Trojan horse' it. There are so many great YA heroines, and that's fantastic, but what about the emotionally complex boy out there? That's who I tend to write about.

There are so many things we have not seen in 'Spider-Man' yet... I want to use bad guys never seen in movies. The first films were so traditional and so scrupulously followed the character's classic plot... So there's a lot of stuff left in stock. 'The Clone Saga,' for example.

An action movie should, like any other, follow the narrative traditions of literature. That means there should be subtlety, a slow build and a gradual bringing together of all the separate threads of the plot. To see all of it coming together slowly is very rewarding for the audience.

You can't build a plot out of jokes. You need tragic relief. And you need to let people know that when a lot of frightened people are running around with edged weaponry, there are deaths. Stupid deaths, usually. I'm not writing 'The A-Team' - if there's a fight going on, people will get hurt. Not letting this happen would be a betrayal.

This means keeping many trails open at once, inevitably requiring a fairly 'parallel' plot. This plot should be discovered rather than announced, so show, don't tell.