Plot Predictability Quotes

It's hard to write a good play because it's hard to structure a plot. If you can think of it off the top of your head, so can the audience.

The problem with romantic comedies is you know the ending by the poster. So they're not movies you can keep doing over and over again expect satisfaction somehow.

People know where romantic comedies are going. It's not brain surgery to figure out the end of a romantic comedy.

Many thrillers follow such reliable formulas that you can look at what's happening and guess how much longer a film has to run.

I have always felt like romantic comedies are incredibly predictable. You look at the poster and you know those two are ending up together at the end of the movie.

I think I made a mistake with [Jane] Austen by reading all six in a row. There are similarities to the plots so by the time I got to the last one I could anticipate what was happening too easily. But her characterizations are amazing.

My grandmother, when she looked at American movies, she said, 'They're all the same. In the first scene somebody shoots somebody and then everybody makes phone calls.'

There are no new stories. It all depends on how you handle them. In romances the characters are going to fall in love with each other; you know that when you see the syrupy cover. It's how get there that's the fun.

Sometimes, actors in films will play the ending of the movie, or even the middle, and you know where it's going - as an audience member, you can read the actor.

During seventy years of TV, the audience came to feel that the rules are, you can't kill the second lead on your TV show! Whatever's going to happen, it's all okay because there's no way they can kill the star.

As time goes on, at both DC and Marvel, characters notch up so many victories that we often start to think of them as infallible, which is kind of death for adventure fiction.

Rex Stout's narrative and dialogue could not be improved, and he passes the supreme test of being rereadable. I don't know how many times I have reread the Wolfe stories, but plenty. I know exactly what is coming and how it is all going to end, but it doesn't matter. That's writing.

The audience today has heard every joke. They know every plot. They know where you're going before you even start. That's a tough audience to surprise, and a tough audience to write for. It's much more competitive now, because the audience is so much more - I want to say 'sophisticated.'

Usually, with a novel, you start with no idea what to do because your job is to create convincing characters and then they just run around getting crazy. The problem with writing a memoir, obviously, is you can't do that because you sort of know what's going to happen. Because you're the character.

When I started in television, it was brand new. It was the miracle over in the corner of your room. Now the audience has seen every story line. People have heard every joke. They can predict the plot almost before a show starts. That's a hard, sophisticated audience to reach.

When you do a TV show, there's always the fear that it will become tired and you'll know exactly what's going to happen.

Rocky is a very predictable movie. The ending is a foregone conclusion.

There's a conventional reaction when you see a star: You anticipate he'll be a part of a particular denouement down the road, so you don't worry for that character.

Mystery books. I must read a hundred a year. . . I just wish some of them were harder to figure out.

The plot is so tired that even this reviewer, who in infancy was let drop by a nurse with the result that she has ever since been mystified by amateur coin tricks, was able to guess the identity of the murderer from the middle of the book.

In the '80s, all the movies became predictable.

The day a character becomes predictable is the day a writer should think about moving on - because the reader certainly will.

The horror genre is not my favorite. I think it's fun, there's a great place for it and I get a kick out of it, but some stuff I'm too old for. You can't just take 10 guys and stick them in a cabin and off them one at a time - I'm not vested.

If you have Julia Roberts in a movie you're never really afraid for her because you know she's not going to die.

There are lots of things that you can go down the list and say, "Oh, these are cliches, we've seen this before, just hits every checkpoint." All of that takes a secondary status for me if I'm reading something and I just really like the characters.