Peter Shaffer Quotes

For the professional writer, stories must be presented as a series of individual scenes, each one dramatized with dialogue and telling descriptions of who is present and what they're all doing.

Every writer has compressed time and procedure, and used clarifying dialogue. That's not a scandal: it's a legitimate dramatic technique.

I'm more interested in character than events. I've observed that about myself as a writer. I find events, even the most dramatic sort, not to be such fertile ground.

When I was first starting to write plays, I quite literally had never heard of the idea of studying playwriting. I wouldn't have studied it even if I had heard of it.

The novelist must ground his work in faithful study of human nature.

I think it's a short story writer's duty, as well as writing well about emotions and characters, to write story.

One of the tricks to writing great plays is to get people in a room together and not let them leave. You want the tension to escalate. Keeping them there is the hardest part, so you have to take away any excuse for them to leave.

I'm still very much a believer in the spontaneity of certain kinds of writing. But then you have to eventually, when you're writing a long play, make adjustments along the way - all kinds of adjustments.

I'm sure that everything you do contributes to the sort of novel that you write. A lot of actors have an understanding of drama and a good ear for dialogue and also the rhythm of speech. Similarly, my 16 years in radio drama has influenced me. You only have 45 minutes, or 7,000 words, to tell a story, so every scene has to have a point.

It's hard to write a good play because it's hard to structure a plot. If you can think of it off the top of your head, so can the audience.

I'm terrible at story and structure, but I'm not so bad at writing dialogue.

Once I have a hook I think has potential - enough to spin out more than a hundred thousand words, then I start turning my attention to characters. Who are these people? Why did this thing happen to them? But the hook always comes first.

I think of it as the lasagna approach to writing because I'm always adding layers. I'll sometimes do it layer by layer, with dialogue, attribution, action, objects in the scene, setting... It can be sometimes that delineated.

So I work hard to present the human side of my characters while not neglecting the plot.

It's hard to write a good plot, it's very hard.

Everyone thinks they can write a play; you just write down what happened to you. But the art of it is drawing from all the moments of your life.

You asked what is the secret of a really good sketch. And it is a sketch is a small play. It's got a beginning, and a middle and an end. It should have a plot; it should have the characters, conflict. It is a little play. And in it, will be funny stuff.

I feel like I know how to write plot.

I consider plot a necessary intrusion on what I really want to do, which is write snappy dialogue.

My job is to help my father tell stories.

I wish I could remember how to write a play. I can't remember how they happened.

Storytelling is my true passion.

Producing is figuring out how to make each character have a distinct voice, how to make the story twist and turn - that's the biggest challenge.

It always comes down to script and characters.

So writing stories is not easier in comparison to the playwriting or translation; the stories are easier in league with them.