Simon Toyne Quotes

I noticed that 'Lost' had sort of worn out our welcome; because of 'Lost,' audiences were no longer being patient with slow reveals: they wanted answers quickly, and they wanted story to develop much faster.

There's this thing in TV that I find hysterical where the writers and creators will ask us if you want to know what happens to your character or if you want to experience it episode by episode. In the theatre, we always know the ending; we always know where the character is going.

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

If you watched 'Lost,' sometimes the episodes were crazy good, and sometimes you're like, 'That one was just sorta there.'

One of the things I admire about longer stories is the way writers can work with dead time and slower, more idle moments - not only can they feel expansive, they feel lived-in; the unhurried pacing often makes the endings even more resonant and surprising for me.

I hate SF books that think all you need to make a book is cool technology and mind-bending ideas without a decent plot or characters. And I hate when fantasy books are allowed to ramble off into five hundred page diatribes which don't advance the story one bit.

If a character's suddenly spouting information that's supposed to bring you up to date, it can seem artificial or contrived.

The danger of writing a so-called thriller is that in your last 100 pages, all of these really interesting characters you've created are just running away from something or toward something, but they're no longer capable of innovation or discovery.

While problems in a film are fairly easy to identify, the sources of those problems are often extraordinarily difficult to assess. A mystifying plot twist or a less-than-credible change of heart in our main character is often caused by subtle underlying issues elsewhere in the story.

The great thing about 'Breaking Bad' was they were able to write themselves out of anything.

Good drama must be drastic.

I like a drama. And I think that's the basis of good films, or good plays, is to have a nice drama.

When writing, you can't break physical rules. You can't have people come back from the dead. That's cheating. I am a kind of narrative fundamentalist in many ways.

When writing a novel, I'm not smart enough to know how to foreshadow something if I don't know what it is.

I've always liked working on stories that combine people who are relatable with something insane.

I really dig the writers, and I think they challenged me for the most part throughout the journey on the show. If you don't challenge me in a series sort of situation, boy, I couldn't be on it long.

I learned everything I know about plot from Dame Agatha (Christie).

It's always the script that's going to lure me. And I don't really care about the part.

The number 1 thing that I don't want to see in a story is when characters exist simply to be proven wrong.

All writing is discipline, but screenwriting is a drill sergeant.

Some TV shows are like really good novels in that there are enough episodes that you start to have your own feelings about how the characters should act. When the scriptwriters go slightly wrong, when they make the character make a left turn that he or she wouldn't do, you know enough about the characters to say, "No, that's not what she would do there. That's wrong." You can actually argue with a TV show in a way that you can't do as much with movie - you inhabit a TV show in the way you inhabit a novel.

I'd like to work with some of the videogame companies for the simple fact that they obviously need some sort of writer's help. I play videogames, and lately it's hard for me to enjoy them because I'm spending all my time cringing at the corny dialogue, thin characters, and glaring plot holes.

Any time two characters are talking about a third, the scene is a crock of s***.

The movie itself was very interesting, but I didn't think it was very good because I didn't really feel different when it was over.

In fiction writing ideas have to be handled extremely carefully. You can't let your characters just be mouthpieces for your ideas. They have to live and breathe on their own.