Carol Berg Quotes

To me, action has to come from the plot.

In particular, I'm drawn to the stories that have big, high concepts and real characters at their heart. And I love where those two worlds meet, and 'Edge of Tomorrow' is the perfect canvas to explore that.

In order to deliver the emotional truth in the story, you have to include some of the literal truth.

It interests me to imagine characters shifting from one situation and one location to another for whatever the circumstances may be.

'The Wire' is similar to 'The Walking Dead' in so far as everybody pulling for everybody else to get to the turning point of the story.

In the 'Buffy' room, it was never about a plot twist, ever. It was always about, 'Tell the story, tell the characters, complicate their lives, make things get worse,' but we never worked backwards from the plot, and it was always a great lesson.

This is the story, this is your character, I have the sense of the landscape, I have the sense of the scene, I have all that stuff. But I'm also looking for something else to happen, an accident or something. You're focused on the story you intend to tell and then you have to have a peripheral net out to catch these accidents.

You can throw a novel into focus with one overheard line.

Any show I'm working on, I want the stories to always be about something, and to have the potential to be emotional. That's the kind of story that I like.

'The Piano Lesson' is very sophisticated, easily the most adult or complex material I've attempted. It's the first film I've written that has a proper story, and it was a big struggle for me to write. It meant I had to admit the power of narrative.

There are two questions that you ask yourself as a writer, and one of them is, 'But why?' The question that takes the book forward is, 'What if? What if x y or z happened? How would those characters react?'

Settings are obviously important - and as a writer, you have to respect what was real at the time of the story you're writing. But the real key to success lies in finding the right characters to carry that story.

I think in some ways, you end up with more interesting storytelling with series, because if you've written yourself into a corner with something in book 1, you have to be cleverer to get out of it.

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

Whenever you can manoeuvre your characters into a situation where they both have a good argument to make, you're on the right track.

We give you characters we'd feel very comfortable judging, and then go: 'Oh yeah? Watch this'.

As an actor, I think a mistake that any storyteller can make is to play the ending.

Some novels present a story form many points of view. Most movies tell only one person's side of the story. Sometime it's easy to use the strongest point of view, or find the character with the most dramatic experience. It depends on which themes the scriptwriter wants to explore.

You want to suggest something new, but at the same time, resolve the drama of the action in the novel.

Sometimes, you don't realize that something is actually a sidetrack for the story, or it takes the tension out of a scene.

If the right idea comes up, and it feels true to talk about somebody being in a truck, and that's the only way to tell the story, then I will reluctantly tell the story that way.

If a novelist has created vivid characters, interesting relationships, settings the reader can easily imagine, and intriguing stories, a screenwriter has loads to work with. The challenge comes with deciding what to cut and what to keep.

You've either got to find a way to make your continuing characters insteresting without making them maudlin or overwrought, or you've got to put more emphasis on the suspects.

The story drove the book. That had a very seminal effect on the way I saw writing and storytelling. If you can set a character in a story that is compelling and has a backbone, you draw people in.

I do novels a bit backward. I look for a situation, a milieu first, and then I wait to see who walks into it.