Quotes About Plot

Essentially and most simply put, plot is what the characters do to deal with the situation they are in. It is a logical sequence of events that grow from an initial incident that alters the status quo of the characters.

Not counting 'Small Steps,' I think 'Holes' is my best book, in terms of plot, and setting, and the way the story revealed itself. It hasn't changed my life, other than that I have more money than I did before I wrote it. I'm still too close to 'Small Steps' to compare it to 'Holes.'

Indeed, North America Indian policy in the last half of the nineteenth century had many of the qualities of a bad movie. It was a low-budget affair with a simplistic plot: politicians, soldiers, clerics, social scientists, and people of unexamined goodwill dash about North America, saving themselves from Indians by saving Indians from themselves

One might suppose from such a beginning that Friday is to be a futuristic James Bond adventure. It's not, though the action is often of that ilk. However, the action is rarely anything but icing on the cake and rarely servees to advance the plot. There is a plot, though the author contrives with great grace to let it all take place in the reader's peripheral vision.

Readers tend to tolerate such "accidents"... when they get the characters into trouble but they're less accepting when the author uses them to rescue people. The "deus ex machina"...in one stroke it renders meaningless all the efforts of the cast.

Well, there's no question that a good script is an absolutely essential, maybe the essential thing for a movie.

The thing I don't like on television is when somebody does something that makes absolutely no sense just for the shock of it.

I think a film noir demands a beginning and an end.

I write both fiction and nonfiction. I begin my fiction with the main character. The story comes later.

If you'll notice, we don't have any real out and out jokes on 'Hogan.' Basically the program is drama.

I always try to create conflict and drama in my books; it's the engine of the novel.

Novels usually evolve out of 'character.' Characters generate stories, and the shape of a novel is entirely imagined but should have an aesthetic coherence.

I think sex is a very minor part of most romance novels.

The financial markets tend to be just a backdrop for a novel, for a heist or something that isn't necessarily integral to it. On the whole, I don't think the financial world has been well served by novels.

When I was writing 'The Luminaries,' I read a lot of crime novels because I wanted to figure out which ones made me go, 'Ah! I didn't know that was coming!'

It had to be a trick or you couldn't have done it.

Four basic factors are present in every story, with varying degrees of emphasis: milieu, idea, character, and event.

It occurred to me then for the first time that the idea of the story is nothing compared to the importance of knowing how to find a character and a story to tell around that idea.

A story is easier to follow, [...] if it begins at the beginning and not half way through.

If they were afloat on the sea, and blind in the fog — they didn't even know what direction they should turn in. What then did it matter that she knew reading and writing, or that he had been caught out in a plot against his overlord?

The "meaning of life" is really the center about which the novel moves.

Plot is the structure of revelation.

The most important lesson I've learned as a writer is that practice of the art is something I must exercise every day. The reason for this constant training is that any idea worth discovering is bigger than my head. The twists and turns, story and plot, characters and character development of a novel cannot be held in a single thought or even in a train of thought. This novel takes up a lot of space and needs room to breathe and evolve.

Furthermore, plot, as JG wisely put it, is the storyteller's equivalent to the philosopher's argument; its importance lies in it being an interpretation (one based on causation) of why the world works the way it does.