Plot Depth Quotes

People pitch me the crazy mystery mind-blowing thing all the time. My response is, 'Great, but how do the characters feel about it, and how do we reveal new facets and new dimensions of who they are?'

In 'The Beginning,' each one of us was introduced, but the audience didn't know our back stories and the drama. You wouldn't have known how deep Bhallaladeva's jealousy for Baahubali is.

On the sequel, you've lost the element of surprise. Usually, on the first one you may not go very, very deep into character; the second one you start to explore the character a bit more.

I think books with weak or translucent plots can survive if the character being drawn along the path is rich, interesting and multi-faceted. The opposite is not true.

I try to stay away from stuff that's just action, action, action, action, action, and you kind of fast-forward through the dialogue scenes. I'm not interested in doing that. Give me a reason to fight, and I'll go there. But don't just make it, 'You touched my pen! Haaa-yah!' I've done that before.

The action stuff is only good if you get the character stuff in there as well. Sometimes that get lost in amongst all the trying to make stuff blow up.

The film opens up the world beyond Katniss' point of view, allowing the audience access to the happenings of places like the Hunger Games control room and President Snow's rose garden, thereby adding a new dimension to the story.

I always look for interesting, complex characters. You know, interesting, well-written material.

I think 'The Condemned' has a great story. It's a lot more than a mindless action flick.

For feel-good fiction to work, there has to be an element of darkness.

Scripts that make characters a two-sentence description, I'm not interested in.

The world is full of novels in which characters simply say and do. There are certainly legitimate genres in which this is sufficient. But in real and lasting writing the character is.

I love the characters not knowing everything and the reader knowing more than them. There's more mischief in that and more room for seriousness, too.

In a regular soap, you do the routine stuff, but in a supernatural show, there are so much more to do and learn.

Keep everything in context, and try to have each line doing more than one thing - not just giving exposition but also revealing character and history, etc.

Sometimes there is more exploration in the character for a villain.

What I perceive in science fiction is that it's more about how everything looks than what's going on, which I think is just difficult if you're an action character. I think they are about character, not about what it looks like.

I think the key is to give the reader characters they not only care about, but identify with, and to never take away all hope.

It's not that fun to just play a villain, without any reasoning behind it.