Quotes About Plot

Oh, and one thing. Please, please don't depend on me too much. I mean that. I'm not going to be of much help. If your plots come to a head—if things go wrong at the last moment and you're in danger or distress—don't think of me. I will fail you. That I promise from my heart with absolute sincerity." - Lightsong

Brandon: How does the character fit into the story, how will people expect them to fit into the story, and how, therefore, can I make them incongruous for those expectations? I'm looking for incongruity. Ask yourself why this character cannot fill the role in the plot that they are expected to fulfill. Ask yourself who would be perfect for this role. I'm not going to use that person.

literary fiction is fiction that examines the character of the people involved in the story, and that popular fiction is driven by plot. Whereas popular fiction, I tell them, is meant primarily as a means of escape, one way or another, from this present life, a kind of book equivalent of comfort food, literary fiction confronts us with who we are and makes us look deeply at the human condition.

I can't make out what you're up to . . . You strike me as having mysterious purposes — vast designs.

Once upon a time, about 10 years ago, I thought maybe I could write a mystery series about a midwife in Elizabethan England. I had an elaborately convoluted title and an elaborately convoluted plotline, and at that point I got stupendously bored.

Yes, it's annoying that Hamlet doesn't kill his stepfather ten minutes into the play, but if he did kill his stepfather ten minutes into the play, there wouldn't be a play. He has to be annoying, if you will, and not do what would be the thing to do.

Plot is tremendously important to me: I can't stand books where nothing happens, and I can't imagine ever writing a novel without at least one murder.

I always have one or two, sometimes more, Navajo or other tribes' cultural elements in mind when I start a plot. In Thief of Time, I wanted to make readers aware of Navajo attitude toward the dead, respect for burial sites.

At the time I begin writing a novel, the last thing I want to do is follow a plot outline. To know too much at the start takes the pleasure out of discovering what the book is about.

This is how stories end, with all these leftover characters, nothing left for them to do.

The best scary movies have great humor in them and a great story.

Chapter the Eleventh: In Which the Plot, Behaving in Much the Manner Of a Soup to which Corn Starch Has been Added, Begins, at Last, to Thicken.

I have a clever and devious plan.

Plan. Yes. Good idea. I should come up with a plan.

I'm very much about stories that are fast but character development that moves slow.

I find that I am much slower in the beginning of a book. I am thinking of the plot, of the characters and who they are, and where they are going. I often throw out a lot of the writing I start with, because the characters and plot improve as I write. Or perhaps I should say it is my hope they will improve as I write.

Conflict drives fiction; no one wants to read a four-hundred-page novel in which everything rolls along smoothly.

Is a novel anything but a trap set for a hero?

There's no good story without romance.

God, I'd love to do a big commercial movie that made a lot of money and whose plot was interesting too.

My love is to tell a story but I like stories that evolve from character, from the nature of the individuals involved.

This isn't a script, Julian says. It's not going to add up. Not everything's going to come together in the third act.

The men in King Cobra have already worked through whatever issues they might have had about their sexuality, and they have other problems to deal with, and there's an actual plot that isn't about being gay—it's just a crime drama.

The whole of life is just like watching a film. Only it's as though you always get in ten minutes after the big picture has started, and no-one will tell you the plot, so you have to work it out all yourself from the clues.