Stanley Schmidt Quotes

A story really isn't truly a story until it reaches its climax and conclusion.

If you have a problem with the third act, the real problem is in the first act.

I think stories do have an ending. I think they need to have an ending eventually because that is a story: a beginning, middle and end. If you draw out the end too long, I think storytelling can get tired.

I'm one of those people who think that stories should have a beginning, a middle and an end, and then they're over, and then you tell the next story.

I care about narrative structure; I care about how stories unfold.

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.

All stories have a beginning, a middle and an ending, and if they're any good, the ending is a beginning.

What's important on a comedy show, or any show, is that some stories have to go somewhere. There have to be ends to the beginnings and middles you create. But sometimes it's like a way station on the highway, then the actual thing doesn't have to be this giant, climactic, life-changing, game-changing thing.

Plot is what happens in your story. Every story needs structure, just as every body needs a skeleton. It is how you 'flesh out and clothe' your structure that makes each story unique.

But then of course you reach a point where you have to say, I've got to figure out how this book's going to end. Otherwise, you're going to write yourself into so many dead-ends.

In a lot of cases, writers discover that the novel needs to begin later in the action than they'd first thought.

Unless the story line carries the scenes, the scenes don't really mean anything.

My conception of it was that in a normal film you have a story with different movements that program, develop, go a little bit off the trunk, come back, and end.

It's nice to know when you're a part of a story, it's nice to know at least something about the beginning, middle, and end.

Sometimes television can just jump from one bit of plot to the next, and the words fill in the in-between.

The main thing for me is I really like strong endings. If there's a strong ending, you can take more time in the beginning, your first act can be really quite different.

The story was such that I couldn't make a graceful ending and then make a graceful new beginning. I could have, but I didn't want to. So, it isn't the most graceful way of writing a story. This new story is, I think, is pretty good stuff. I'm pleased with it anyway.

Marc Cherry is so good at writing himself into a corner, then writing himself out of that corner. It's really fun to watch that.

It's always good to have a story arch.

You want to suggest something new, but at the same time, resolve the drama of the action in the novel.

The point about a great story is that it's got a beginning, a middle and end.

You run the risk, whenever you build your story around a central mystery, of either letting it go too long, or revealing it too soon and then taking the wind out of the sails of the narrative.

I've always said I'm less interested in twists as I am about escalation.

I can't say that the ending of a story is always the best part of the story, and yet there's sort of this implicit idea that the finale is somehow supposed to be the mind-blowing best episode of a show. The question is: Why is that? Why do people make that assumption?

Titles are important; I have them before I have books that belong to them. I have last chapters in my mind before I see first chapters, too. I usually begin with endings, with a sense of aftermath, of dust settling, of epilogue.