Quotes About Plot

A great story must have, first of all, a good plot, a great deed, a good work, something worth doing. You cannot write a great story about saving a button on a sweater and nothing more. You can, however, write a great story about saving the world, which is what Tolkien did.

Bin Laden was eager to memorialize the 9/11 attacks with another spectacular one. He told his deputies that killing President Barack Obama was a high priority, but he also had General David Petraeus, the then-commander in Afghanistan, in his sights. Bin Laden told his team not to bother with plots against Vice President Joe Biden, whom he considered "totally unprepared" for the post of president.

ACTRESS: Nonsense! It was an automaton controlled by the boy's mesmeric waves as part of a plot organised by my rivals.

There's a plot afoot all right, and I'll gladly name the forces propelling it - hysteria, ignorance, malice , stupidity, hatred, and fear

You're kidding me! Vice Admiral Horth told her com screen. The hell I am. There was just over a one-second transmission delay each way between Soissons Orbit One and Jefferson Field, and Admiral Marat's expression was less humorous even than the weapons fire in Horth's plot when he replied two seconds later. We've got a rogue drop commando in an alpha-synth, Becky, and she's boosting out of here like a bat out of hell.

The middle of a novel is a state of mind. Strange things happen in it. Time collapses.

There are a lot of action movies with very little comedy.

Almost every story has a romantic angle to it.

It's always good to have a story arch.

Let a play have five acts, neither more nor less.

There is no bombast, no similes, flowers, digressions, or unnecessary descriptions. Everything tends directly to the catastrophe.

Hell, the first thing you've got to do if you're going to make a picture is to get a story. The next thing is to get a good script, the next thing is to figure out who the hell is going to play in it, your characters, and then after that to make it.

This particular blunder is known as deus ex machina , which is French for "Are you fucking kidding me?

I have a plot, but not much happens.

Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action

We are always sure that the heroine is fiery and passionate, which is quite an achievement when the plot has had to keep her passive, inactive and loveless for long stretches. Up to the point when Jane's love declares itself, the novel establishes the passion largely by negatives—a method very prophetic of that of D. H. Lawrence, who was in many ways influenced by Charlotte Brontë.

I always have a plan.

Science fiction is an amazing literature: plot elements that you would think would be completely worn out by now keep changing into surprising new forms.

I tried to write about my first marriage in a fictional version but got two pages into it and realised it was too personal. Then I came up with an old-fashioned love triangle, which became the plot for 'Ralph's Party.'

I have to know the killer, the victim and the motive when I begin. Then I start to create the characters and see how the novel takes shape based on what these people are like.

So much of the literature we had to read for high school English class was filled with victimized, tragic, symbolic women who spurred the plot forward with their inevitable shunning/death/shunning-followed-by-pregnancy-followed-by-death timelines.

My first attraction to writing novels was the plot, that almost extinct animal. Those novels I read which made me want to be a novelist were long, always plotted, novels - not just Victorian novels, but also those of my New England ancestors: Herman Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne.

Just because I didn't create the plan didn't mean a plan didn't exist.

There are Mornings" Even now, when the plot calls for me to turn to stone, the sun intervenes. Some mornings in summer, I step outside and the sky opens and pours itself into me as if I were a saint about to die. But the plot calls for me to live, be ordinary, say nothing to anyone. Inside the house, the mirrors burn when I pass.