Story Flexibility Quotes

Hopping around time in a non-linear storytelling fashion (on 'Lost') allows you to bring back characters who are dead and, in some cases, buried. Now that time travel is the story itself, it opens up even more doors. So when an actor reads that they're getting killed off on the show, they're basically, like, 'Okay, but should I still bother to show up next week?'

Well, I think if you're telling a story, a three act structure will just naturally emerge out of it. But I also love it when a film doesn't feel like it's anchored too rigidly to that structure and you feel like anything could happen.

It's amazing how flexible the human mind is in terms of jumping into a backstory or an aside. Vonnegut is a great example - it's not a linear story by any means, but somehow your brain is keeping it moving in one direction even though the story is taking you in all these different directions.

To be honest, when you're running a series and you have an open end, you don't want to limit yourself too much with the choices you've got for a particular character.

It is much easier to be flexible about where a story begins than it ever was for me to change my mind about where and how a story ended.

If you over-plot your book you strangle your characters. Your characters have to have enough freedom and life to be able to surprise you.

When you find you don't like a character, you just type four letters and he's dead.

The best thing about being a fiction writer is that where the truth is inconvenient, I could veer away.

But really, for the most part - doing a prequel is great because you do have room to kind of free this character and how they got to where they are instead of being a slave to exactly what the previous actor did.

One of the horribly frustrating things about writing feature films is the rules everyone applies and says, 'You have to do this by the end of the first act and by the end of the second act you must introduce this.' As if there were rules to life or telling a story or the ways things happen, which of course there aren't.

As long as a character doesn't die, the character can always come back.

The good thing with 'Insidious' and 'The Further' is that it's so nebulous, this supernatural world, that it allows you to bend things. There's a lot of room, it's very malleable, like how in the second film we had a lot of time travel.