Story Change Quotes

In my novel, 'First Blood,' Rambo died. In the films, he lives.

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

Change the story and you change perception; change perception and you change the world.

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.

A lot can change in the editing room.

'Dexter,' while the pilot shares moments with the novel that created the character of Dexter, they completely abandoned the book from that moment on.

In an early version of the story, I thought Aang could shepherd a herd of twenty bison.

Some after-the-fact storytelling is inevitable, and, in fact, very good and useful. But then we want always to be able to enrich the stories, or maybe change the stories with a fresh infusion of specificity.

Unfortunately, the author of a book pretty much gives up control of the story when the producers take over a book to make it into a movie.

I revise a lot while I'm drafting, often going back to the beginning again and again to revise because I've changed massive things about the story. By the time I get to the end of a first draft, I've been through the beginning lots of times.

I didn't become a good writer until I learned how to rewrite. And I don't just mean fixing spelling and adding a comma. I rewrite each of my books five or six times, and each time I change huge portions of the story.

Trust me, I'm telling you stories. ... I can change the story. I am the story.

When you change your NOW story, you instantly change your past story and your future story.

If you want to tell a new story, it is a risk. But then you have to do it in the best financial way as possible.

I have on my wall right now a front page of the 'Journal' from January 1991, when I co-wrote a front-page story about Iraq firing missiles at Israel. By October, I was writing about tech products.

Perhaps the story you finish is never the one you begin.

Old stories have a habit of being told and retold and changed. Each subsequent storyteller puts his or her mark upon it. Whatever truth the story once had is buried in bias and embellishment. The reasons do not matter as much as the story itself.

I come up with a blurb at the beginning, but the book will always be completely different by the time it's finished. They say, 'Where's the book you were going to write?' And I say, 'Forget about it. It doesn't exist.'

I think very few shows have come into our industry and changed the tempo and the narrative of stories, and 'Once Upon a Time' did that.

Write out the story - rapidly, fluently, and not too critically - following the second or narrative-order synopsis. Change incidents and plot whenever the developing process seems to suggest such change, never being bound by any previous design.

His words had tossed the book that was her life into the air and the pages had been blown into disarray, could never be put back together to tell the same story.

When I start, I have a feeling for the characters, and maybe the shape of the story. Sometimes I might even have the last sentence in mind. But, no book I've ever written has ever ended the way I thought it would. Characters disappear, others come forward. Once you start writing, everything changes.

So, it's a delicate thing, but at the same time our producers and writers are very much aware of the potential downfall that could ensue so I think they're going to be very careful about how they do that. At the same time I don't think they want to leave the characters in the same holding pattern that they've been in for a while. I think that they're all trying to put the characters in a different situation.

I think if you've held onto a character for several years and then you're getting rid of that character, it's going to be traumatic.

It's very unusual for scenes to be added for a character.