Narrative Progression Quotes

Every ongoing character has to start somewhere.

We all now tell stories by cutting from one dramatic scene to the next, whereas Victorian novelists felt free to write long passages of undramatic summary.

The first act's doubtful, but we say, it is the last commends the play.

A story is not the same thing when it ends as it was when it began.

Every paragraph should accomplish two goals: advance the story, and develop your characters as complex human beings.

I think a challenge with every sitcom is, how do you maintain things that people are attached to without becoming so reiterative that it just feels like you're sort of watching a reenactment of previous episodes?

The movie has to be going somewhere. Other than that, you want it to be entertaining, but people usually disagree on what entertaining is and everybody has different tastes.

You are always working towards the moments in which characters experience reckonings or insight or change. I like to track them past those moments.

As an actor what you're always looking for is a character that is going to grow and change especially on television. I feel incredibly lucky to be working on a television show where the writing is always geared towards us growing and changing.

Time is what makes good stories. Much has been cooking for a long time, and at last finds an out in narration one day. That's a supreme joy. And why the characters keep showing up.

A great thing is happening on cable TV. You see characters change in stories over years, like in Tolstoy. That's a whole, thrilling new form that I really enjoy. They are Tolstoy-an in their endless character development and narrative changes... a show like 'Breaking Bad' is astonishing.

It's fun to grow with a character over the course of a TV series. Video games are usually a much more condensed process.

Every story teaches you how to write that story but not the next story.

There is a natural progression to 'Lost,' and as the story goes forward, it's going to change. It's not a static story. The franchise of 'Lost' is not characters sitting on a beach.

The modern story begun, one might say, with Edgar Allan Poe, which proceeds inexorably, like a machine destined to accomplish its mission with the maximum economy of means.

There's something pretty awesome about staying with a character and growing.

Audiences are just like us as writers - we grow attached to characters. In certain ways you don't want them to change.

I was fortunate enough to do an HBO show, 'Rome,' in which my arc was built in by historical fact, and over the course of 22 episodes, we were able to tell the stories of these people. We had a beginning and middle and end, and as we went on, you changed every week.

All plots tend to move deathward. This is the nature of plots.

'Room' was more a study of an individual event, and 'The Family' takes off from there.

It's an interesting plot device to enter in a third wheel - it always helps raise the stakes for all parties involved. But often, those characters can be one-dimensional.

As the story unfolded, the cast of characters changed to match it.

Sometimes you can have a great scene but it just doesn't need to be in the movie. If it's not progressing the plot, not progressing the story, not adding to the momentum, or if it's not purposefully serving a breath - it has got to go.

It's writing songs within the structure of telling a story, so it becomes a platform for diverse songwriting, for a writing process that's broader than just figuring out a song. You're also dealing with always pushing the story forward, with casting the voices, with the orchestration, with the arrangements.

The reader wants to see something happen between pages one and four hundred, and nothing happens if the characters don't change.