Story Originality Quotes

The detective story itself is in a dilemma. It is a vein which is in danger of being worked out, the demand is constant, the powers of supply variable, and the reader, with each one he absorbs, grows a little more sophisticated and harder to please, while the novelist, after each one he writes, becomes a little more exhausted.

The writers led by Mike Scully are fantastic. And they're creating original stories that not only don't repeat what we've already done, they also don't repeat anything I've seen on television.

Studios, to cut through the clutter, want recognisable titles. But that does not excuse you, as a writer, from having an original story.

If the entire script feels formulaic, then you know that the film will be like that. But if it's a really interesting script, and the character happens to be formulaic, then maybe there's a way of making them more interesting.

I am not into this old-school way of doing things, where you kill characters, and you bring them back, and then you kill them again, and then you bring them back, and their deaths mean nothing.

I love sitcoms, and I grew up on sitcoms. That's my tasty junk food. So I wanted to create a sitcom and have some really quirky characters, because most of the stuff they make now is just so marginalized. How interesting is a white guy who's 28 years old and lives in New York? What story have we not seen about a character like that? Just as a writer, it's so much easier to come up with comedy when you have a really oppressed Indian boy. Or a mother who is an addict but still has to take care of her kids.

I always know exactly where my stories take place, which gives me something certain so I can use my imagination for the other stuff. I worry though, who wants to keep reading stories about Kalamazoo?

What I try to do with any of my stories, any of my novels, is make them feel very original.

Initially, when people asked us when 'Toy Story 2' was going to come out, we'd say, 'We have no interest in sequels. We just want to do original stories.'

The problem is there are so many stories out there where I can pull that superhero out, put any other superhero in, and the story works the same. For me, that's broken. I have to write a story that no one else but Aquaman or Shazam can be in, and as soon as you pull that character out and out someone else in, it doesn't work.