Quotes About Plot

In the 'Buffy' room, it was never about a plot twist, ever. It was always about, 'Tell the story, tell the characters, complicate their lives, make things get worse,' but we never worked backwards from the plot, and it was always a great lesson.

I've always believed that a good twist is one that, when it is presented to the audience, half of them say, 'I saw that coming.' And half of them are completely and totally shocked. Because if you don't have the half that saw it coming, then it wasn't fair: You never gave the audience a chance to guess it.

The whole Haley-Nathan marriage deal was a pretty good twist huh? I hope we got all of you with it. That particular story line even suprised me when I read it, it's a good one and it'll provide for some good stories to come.

Jeff Eastin is good in that he'll tell me a plot twist that's coming up if he thinks it would be something Peter would know ahead of time, and if it's something that would be a surprise to Peter, I'll tell Jeff, 'Oh, don't tell me. I don't want to know.' And then it's exciting to read it and exciting to play it.

For me, the worst writing generally just 'flips' things: this person's really a traitor; it was all a dream; etc. Nothing is so ruinous as a forced 'twist,' I think.

I have a hard time with films that I feel like I can predict every twist or turn they take from the moment I start reading the script.

When you're telling taut, tight storytelling that has any kind of built-in plot twist elements, you tend to want to stack everything up on top of itself as opposed to letting things breathe and be languid in terms of the passage of time.

I hate it when it is all about the twist and when the ending comes out of nowhere. I think you should be surprised and shocked, but you should also think, 'Damn, I should have seen it,' because there are clues all the way through.

I would never, for the sake of the story or a twist, have a character do something that they just wouldn't do. I really couldn't. I'd rather miss out on the twist.

Before I start, I trick myself into thinking I know what's going to happen in the story, but the characters have ideas of their own, and I always go with the character's choices. Most of the time I discover plot twists and directions that are better than what I originally had planned.

A lot of the fun of 'Gravity Falls' comes from the secrecy surrounding the plot. We want fans to be able to guess and speculate, to be surprised by twists and be engaged when they get things right.

My writing has a lot of surprising twists.

Normally, in a film with lots of twists and turns, half of them don't make sense; they're just there for their own sakes.

There are times that you have a plot in your head, but then you find that the characters don't want to do that. When you're looking at the story from the outside, you can create whatever twists and turns you want. But when you're writing, you're inside the characters' heads, and you see that they may be motivated to do something different.

My writing has always been what you call 'narrative fiction' in the sense that it's got very strong plots and twists at the end.

Storytelling is about two things; it's about character and plot.

If your characters are two-dimensional and your plot uncompelling, it won't matter how incredibly detailed and believable your fantasy world might be.

Jonathan Lethem's 10th novel, 'The Blot,' is engaging, entertaining, and sharp for its first two-thirds. Then it goes to hell.

Generally my typical books have lots of twists and turns a big surprise ending and then usually another surprise at the end and ideally, as in Garden of Beasts, we get to the very end and we find at the last few pages that there's yet another surprise.

Our biggest challenge is always story. The story is the ultimate thing you try to tackle.

Typically, I have a fairly good grip on the plot of a suspense novel before I set about writing it. I must know beforehand how the mystery ultimately will be solved.

Here's what happens in a play. You get involved in a situation where something is unbalanced. If nothing's unbalanced, there's no reason to have a play. If Hamlet comes home from school, and his dad's not dead and asks him if he's had a good time, it's boring. But if something's unbalanced, it must be returned to order.

Peace proposals unaccompanied by a sworn covenant indicate a plot.

To tell a story, you have to set up your characters, introduce the dramatic premise (what the story is about) and the dramatic situation (the circumstances surrounding the action), create obstacles for your characters to confront and overcome, then resolve the story.