Gilbert Morris Quotes

I've always found the script to be more of a skeleton, the template.

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

It's hard to find scripts that know what they are from page one to page 115.

In judging other people's work, particularly short stories, I have noticed how novice writers tell the readers everything about their characters in the first paragraphs, disclose their motives, reveal their recent activities and their future intentions.

You write a novel by inventing a world and inventing the rules that govern that world. Then you break the rules when you want to.

If you're writing a novel, you can afford to see where the spirit takes you, but in terms of structure and engineering with a screenplay, you have to be quite pragmatic; otherwise, it will run away from you.

What a good novelist does with a throwaway that serves no fictional purpose is throw it away.

My only conclusion about structure is that nothing works if you don't have interesting characters and a good story to tell.

In a novel, you have space to develop a character or a scene. You don't have that luxury in a 700-800-word picture book.

There's this inherent screenplay structure that everyone seems to be stuck on, this three-act thing. It doesn't really interest me. To me, it's kind of like saying, 'Well, when you do a painting, you always need to have sky here, the person here and the ground here.' Well, you don't.

I don't make unconventional stories; I don't make non-linear stories. I like linear storytelling a lot.

A novel is utterly your own creation, a very private process. I think of a novel as a noun and a screenplay as a verb. In a novel, very little needs to happen; you can explore a person's memories and thoughts and fantasies. In a screenplay, it's all action; you must push the story on.

A subplot is a distinguishing characteristic of the novel; the short story, for example, does not need subplots.

Like all writing rules, the injunction to start with the trouble can be broken, and it should be sometimes - if there's good reason.

Whichever character I'm using and wherever I am in my mind dictates what kind of story I'm going to tell.

There is no other way of writing a novel than to begin at the beginning at to continue to the end.

I started as a playwright. Any sort of scriptwriting you do helps you hone your story. You have the same demands of creating a plot, developing relatable characters and keeping your audience invested in your story. My books are basically structured like three-act plays.

There is a quite a lot of effort involved but I find action sequences some of the quickest to write and the most fun.

If you know exactly what your character knows, it's a drama.

Every creator sets up their world differently. That's what's so amazing about someone like Aaron Sorkin and his writing.

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.

There are many ways to go about a story. And if you give yourself some formal constraints, it just makes the job so much - maybe 'easier' isn't the right word, but because you know your boundaries, you can just play within those boundaries much more, so it's much more fun to do.

In a lot of ways, TV writing taught me how to be a good storyteller. I learned about dialogue, scenes, moving the plot forward.

And I don't want to begin something, I don't want to write that first sentence until all the important connections in the novel are known to me. As if the story has already taken place, and it's my responsibility to put it in the right order to tell it to you.

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.