Plot Structure Quotes

To make it interesting and worth doing, writing a novel has to be a leap into the unknown. I have to be unsure if I can write it; otherwise, I won't want to.

Storytelling is my currency. It's my only worth. The only thing of value I have in this life is my ability to tell a story, whether in print, orating, writing it down or having people acting it out.

People still love a good story, and I don't think that will change.

You just find the best actors that you can. There's an inherent drama within the framework of scares and killings and all that. In 'Scream,' there is very real drama that would be in almost any drama.

A novel is never anything, but a philosophy put into images.

Writing a novel isn't like building a brick wall. You don't figure out how to do it, and then it gets easier each time because you know what you're doing. With writing a novel, you have to figure it out each time. Each time you start over, you just have the language and the idea and the hope.

It's the technique, I think, of writing a novel that is difficult for a nonfiction writer.

King Lear alone among these plays has a distinct double action. Besides this, it is impossible, I think, from the point of view of construction, to regard the hero as the leading figure.

I read a lot of script. In my opinion, most of them aren't good or aren't about people.

Especially, I think, living in any fantasy or science fiction world means really understanding what you're seeing and reading really densely on a level that a lot of people don't bother to read.

I feel like I'm a natural-born playwright, but the prose thing has always mystified me. How to keep it going? How do people do it, for years and years?

If I ever wrote a script myself, it would be strongly emotional material.

I don't have a stack of scripts.

Everyone thinks they can write a play; you just write down what happened to you. But the art of it is drawing from all the moments of your life.

I've written close to 20 screenplays and 100 sketches - I know exactly how to do them. They're judged by set criteria that I know.

A novel is a work of poetry. In order to write it, one must have tranquility of spirit and of impression.

If the bible were published as fiction, no reviewer would give it a passing grade. There are some vivid scenes and quotable phrases but there's no plot, no structure, a tremendous amount of filler and the characters are painfully one dimensional. Whatever you do, don't read the bible for a moral code. It advocates prejudice, cruelty, superstition and murder. Read it because we need more atheists.

If it's a drama or comedy, it doesn't matter to me. I just want to like the writing.

When you write fiction, you have an ideal reader in your mind who's sort of you but smarter.

Storytelling is my passion, and it rises from a love of reading.

I learned how to write TV by writing 'Grey's Anatomy.'

When I wrote for TV, I was always thinking in terms of character and story. After fifteen years, it became hard-wired in me.

I am not interested in doing a film on the basis of a good story. I want a proper screenplay.

I took a fiction-writing workshop my sophomore year at Northwestern, and I hadn't yet read Junot Diaz or George Saunders, Flannery O'Connor. There was something so attractive about those voices.

I'm crazy about 'Breaking Bad,' but I wouldn't know how to write an episode of it.