Bryan Cogman Quotes

'The Names' is planned as a nine-part series. I have a kind of road map: I know the final scene of episode nine. But as to exactly how we get there, what detours or horrible accidents we might have to pass through, I like to keep that a little fluid.

It's really about, oh come on, this guy wouldn't say that or he wouldn't do that, you know, it's about the characters, about the story, about the situation.

It's rare that I actually have a story in my head. I have events or 'what's the next move?' Like, Maggie, 'where's she going to go in this story, where's she going to end up?' Then the story has to fill in the in-between, and that comes as I'm starting it.

One of the reasons I started working at 'South Park,' actually, was that I wanted to learn how to structure things and how to tell a story.

Certainly it's very difficult to keep momentum going through a film which has as many characters as this does, and the piece took on a life of its own to try and shape it. That took all the time we had in editing.

I like the idea of a TV show. You take time to get to know your characters. You can introduce a lot of characters. You don't need your three-action set pieces that you usually need for movies.

I never know, when I start writing a story, what's going to happen, or how it will all get sorted out.

Sometimes, in certain stories, I think we know at the outset essentially what the tone is going to be, or it becomes important that we're groping toward some kind of story with a certain kind of tone that we both get somehow. But I don't think how that's combined with other elements is ever in any way overtly discussed.

What I have to outline is action and plot because I'm not particularly good at that.

I try to construct each of my novels around one central theme - core tensions shared by the characters.

The story [for the western genre] is everything. Whether it's a book or a screenplay, the story drives everything. And if you just go out and try to make one by putting on boots and jumping on a horse and riding off... If you don't have the material, the characters and the things to overcome and conflicts that give life to drama, you don't have it.

Know the story before you fall in love with your first sentence. If you don’t know the story before you begin the story, what kind of a storyteller are you? Just an ordinary kind, just a mediocre kind – making it up as you go along, like a common liar.

I don't know quite how a story develops in my head. It is a bit chaotic. If I am working on a series, one of the main characters at least is already in existence as well as some setting and minor characters. Finding the other main character can be a challenge. Sometimes this character already exists in a minor role in another book.

I have always argued, in a good novel, interesting things happen to interesting people.

As a rule, anyone who can tell a good story can write one, so there really need be no mistake about his qualification; such a man will be careful not to be wearisome, and to keep his point, or his catastrophe, well in hand.

When I first began to have the initial idea for 'Heartsease,' I just wrote a skeleton story; that is, I started her off as this young, bright 16-year-old and then added the events that occurred and where she and other characters fitted in, even writing 3 different endings, as I was not sure where Mary's story would lead to.

I prefer to bring these to the service of story rather than to let them replace narrative.

For me, when I start a novel, I only have a general sense of what I am going to do - usually three or four big scenes or something to which I can really respond emotionally.

Short stories are fiction's R & D department, and failed or less-than-conclusive experiments are not just to be expected but to be hoped for.

We start with strong characters and build the movie from there. That not to say we don't struggle with story - that's the most challenging part.

It's people politics, people dynamics that make a show really good, whether it's 'Desperate Housewives' or 'Lost' or 'The Sopranos.' It's the people we've grown to love or otherwise.

I don't always write in order, so composing multi-book stories could get complicated.

I've always loved shows that combine both approaches - that have a mythology and a set of characters, whose stories develop and change, and where the relationships evolve and fracture.

I tend not to know what the plot is or the story is or even the theme. Those things come later, for me.

Theme is great for people who like to approach stories that way, but it's an organizing principle that helps us write a story that has some weight; it's not something that all readers have to care about.