Neil Burger Quotes

Characters develop as the book progresses, but any that start to bore me end up in the wastepaper basket. In real life, we may have to put up with tedious people, but not in novels.

You have 22 episodes to start from zero to hero; you can really take a nice, big, long arc. In a film, it's tough to do that - you only have 90 minutes.

For me, one thing I love is having an arc for a character.

In film, because you know where the ending is, characters can change, but in television, you substitute revelation for change, and that can be hard to pull off.

I love seeing a story evolve over several books and watching characters develop.

Every film you're commissioned to write is all about an arc; usually, the arc is that the world creates a change in the character, usually for the better. To not have an arc, the messages and ideas in the film became more prominent.

I think what good television does well is that it shows characters evolving.

My books usually end where they began. I try to bring characters back to a point that is familiar but different because of the growth that they have gone through.

I rarely return to characters. My characters, at least most of them, are much more a part of that superorganism that is the story than separate and independent creatures.

Being able to stay with a character over the course of years is a gift.

Plot makes the character just as history makes the man.

Novels demand a certain complexity of narrative and scope, so it's necessary for the characters to change.

Filmmaking is always sort of building a mosaic of this arc of what the character is going through.

With a series, you build the character as you go. When you've got a shorter project or a film, you know the overall arc from the beginning.

When I read a script or I see a character, I don't necessarily see the arc of her, that by the end she is this person, she's different from she was in the beginning. I guess it's more a subconscious understanding of that arc.

I look for roles where there is some kind of an arc to the story.

Plots are artificial. Does your life have a plot? It has characters. There is a narrative. There's a lot of story, a lot of character. But plot? Eh, no.

Whenever you're blessed and given a second season, you can really let the characters evolve. That first season, you're setting everything up. It's background, where they're coming from, what they want to do. And then you get to marinate in it that second season.

When you're doing a movie, it's finite - you have a trajectory of where your character's going, and you follow that. Then the storybook closes.

The emotions of the actors are better when they understand the chronological factors that are adding to the story.

There's a reason a happy ending is called an ending. The trick of a television storyteller is to find all the rivers and mountains and valleys on the way to that ending.

What you would call a 'lead,' I've always considered a supporting part, and what people would call 'supporting parts,' I've considered leads. In a way, I look at it in reverse, because supporting parts - when they're done correctly - are the ones that are progenitors for storylines, to move forward.

I don't think they knew exactly where they were going with the character, but they lay those stories out ahead of time, so they had some idea where they wanted it to go.

My character on 'The Good Wife' is a smaller character, and his story arcs are typically season-long, unless it's a big episode for him. His transitions take place over many, many hours.

All fiction is about people, unless it's about rabbits pretending to be people. It's all essentially characters in action, which means characters moving through time and changes taking place, and that's what we call 'the plot'.