Plot Continuity Quotes

The life of a character doesn't just exist between action and cut.

It's tricky to do a serialized show and not lose viewers along the way because you really have to watch every episode.

In our show you have to pay attention and know what happened before. I think it's very intelligent entertainment. It makes demands of viewers that a lot of shows don't.

Everything has to be intrinsic plot-wise in the same way, to use the Linda Williams analogy but to move it on a bit, as musicals - in old musicals, like in an old Cole Porter musical, you get the action, then they do a song, which reflects a moment - everything stops while that is being sung - and then you restart. These days in most musicals, the plot keeps moving through the song. I think it would be nice if someone constructed some pornography where the sex continues to propel you through the story.

When you're writing for the screen, you have to be hyper-conscious every moment of how the audience is going to react. If you write just one scene where the audience is confused or it breaks their concentration in some way, then you've lost them, and you might never get them back.

Sometimes television can just jump from one bit of plot to the next, and the words fill in the in-between.

When I was a kid, if a guy got killed in a western movie I always wondered who got his horse.

Even if an episode is self-contained, the preceding episodes always affect how the audience takes it in.

Well, I don't think characters change. I think they become more revealed. I don't think you really can change a character on a show.

A Thousand Pardons began at the beginning. I wanted it to be one continuous, almost breathless kind of story. In order to do that, it's really hard not to begin at the beginning. There's such a chain of consequence to everything that happens to main characters - it's very hard to break it apart and still be able to hold the plot in your head.

The themes, ideas and the characters from 'Skyfall' can obviously continue on, because it is a franchise, and it is an ongoing story.

There are no inconsistencies in the Discworld books; ocassionally, however, there are alternate pasts.

If you try to make a silent movie with a normal script and you just pull out the dialogue, you will have big problems with the actors because you will ask them to tell a story that you don't know.

Once you buy into a television show, there doesn't have to be resolution from week to week. You can develop characters and storylines and react to the audience, so you get more of a serialized version of storytelling where you can go much deeper into each character. It's more like a novel.

I've found that readers of historical romances really like series because they get to revisit characters and find out what happens with them. I've done several series.

A movie as specific as 'Heathers,' which took place in a specific time and specific place and in which many of the characters got killed off, I never thought it made sense to see a sequel.