Story Scope Quotes

Both 'The Wire' and 'Queer as Folk' had a big scope. They were panoramas, telling ambitious stories about two cities, Baltimore and Manchester, for the first time.

If there's ever a character who can only serve one metaphor, I'll probably tell one story with that character and be done with it.

It's very important that all the supporting characters feel like they've existed in the world, that they've had a history, and they'll go on to have a history within the scope of the story rather than just popping up and then disappearing.

The challenge is, in terms of a canon like 'X-Men,' it's more like 'Harry Potter' and Hogwarts, or 'Game of Thrones.' It needs time and space to evolve and to bring the reader or viewer in and give them a result that's worth the investment of that time.

It's not that I ever sat down and outlined a trilogy, but I always have a sense of what size an idea is when I start it.

What I want to write about has changed somewhat, and the scope of the storytelling has changed accordingly.

I really look up to writers who are able to write compressed, single-scene stories, where everything happens in a kitchen. But I just can't think that way. For me it would be impossible to write a story where I didn't know what someone's parents did and what their grandparents did and who they used to date.

'Game of Thrones' couldn't be a movie. There's too much in it. You couldn't do it justice.

Once, I thought I had a novel, and it turned out it was only a short story. I wrote about 800 pages, but it ended up being a short story. And if it ever happens to me again, I Will Go Insane.

If you take away scale, the nature of the story changes. I made a joke the other day: if I were to try to make 'Glory' now, rather than be about a regiment, it would be about a platoon. It would be seven men in the woods rather than all the men on the beach.

I think I just have an idea in my head about how big an adventure game should be, so it's hard for me to design one that's much smaller than Grim Fandango or Full Throttle. There's just a certain amount of scope needed to create a complex puzzle space and to develop a real story. At least with my brain, there is.

I know what kind of things I myself have been irritated by in detective stories. They are often about one or two persons, but they don't describe anything in the society outside.

'Clockers' - as much as it is a very focused crime drama, it sprawls.

Norman is a very up-close, personal, character drama and I'd like to do something more zoomed out, a little more pastoral, some sweeping epic. I'd like to try something different.

If I had my druthers, I think a 'Cyborg' standalone would be a slightly more intimate story. One of the things that I always think is interesting with these sort of universes is, whenever there's a world-threatening crisis, it always makes you wonder, 'Where are the other members of the group? Why didn't they show up?'

You can get away with stuff in a one-page story that you can't get away with in a book.