Plot Quotes by Walter Kirn, Spencer W. Kimball, Peter Temple, Connie Willis, Francis Quarles, George Villiers and many others.
A loving mother-son relationship is always a plot or outwitting of some kind. ‘Don’t tell anyone, but…’ my mother was always saying to me – when I wasn’t saying it to her.
Wherever you have a plot of land, however small, plant a garden. Staying close to the soil is good for the soul.
I like having a plot, I like characters with a reason to get up in the morning.
I learned everything I know about plot from Dame Agatha (Christie).
My soul, sit thou a patient looker-on; Judge not the play before the play is done: Her plot hath many changes; every day Speaks a new scene; the last act crowns the play
What the devil does the plot signify, except to bring in fine things?
When I’m at the premiere and I see the film in its entirety, I forget plot, I forget the story, I forget what my character goes through, because I really do just let it go.
That’s what life is, it’s the small struggles. You walk down the street for half an hour, you see half an hour of drama. You don’t need convoluted plot lines. You don’t need long-lost brothers. You don’t need it’s set on the future; it’s set on the moon.
I’m open to do a Filipino drama if I like the role or if the plot is attractive to me.
I actually hope people don’t react to ‘Impossible’ in a way where they think it’s terribly retro. The plot needed to do what it needed to do. But I’m a little surprised to find myself looking a little bit like an advocate of teen marriage. It takes some exceptional circumstances for that to be a reasonable idea.
Beating up on public schools is not just our nation’s favorite blood sport, but also a favorite conversational entertainment of the well-off – like debating the most recent toothsome plot twists of ‘Big Love’ – who, of course, have no dog in the fight.
Finishing something is the hardest part. You know it’s not as good as you hoped. You know there are plot problems. You know that by finishing it, you’re saying – even if only to yourself – ‘This is the best I can do.’ And because it’s not perfect, that’s really hard.
If our lives are endangered by plots or violence or armed robbers or enemies, any and every method of protecting ourselves is morally right.
If I had a plot that was all set in advance, why would I want go through the agony of writing the novel? A novel is a kind of exploration and discovery, for me at any rate.
It’s very limited what women who look like me can do on television. You don’t often see ‘my type’ on television unless she’s a sidekick – certainly not a three-dimensional series regular who is pertinent to the plot.
CBS announced they’re canceling As The World Turns. Don’t worry though, if you’re addicted to the twisted plots, the intrigue, the illicit sex, you can still watch golf.
I would say I have sort of a natural gift for character, and following one person’s point of view at a time, and dialogue, but I’m not naturally good at strong plot.
The CIA has a plot…they’ve used before to get rid of world leaders. Only problem…is convincing Hussein…to fly to Dallas.
The whole idea of Mass Effect3 is resolving all of the biggest questions, about the Protheons and
the Reapers, and being in the driver’s seat to end the galaxy and all
of these big plot lines, to decide what civilizations are going to
live or die: All of these things are answered in Mass Effect 3.
the Reapers, and being in the driver’s seat to end the galaxy and all
of these big plot lines, to decide what civilizations are going to
live or die: All of these things are answered in Mass Effect 3.
The beginning of a plot is the prompting of desire.
I obviously read and adore traditional fiction. I teach traditional fiction, I also teach all kind of not-so-traditional fiction. And since I’m such a plot buff, and I’m really such a narrative buff, I can’t seem to relinquish my – not just reliance – but excitement about those traditional techniques.
Plot exposition that can be gently wound out by the authorial voice and internal monologue of a character in the length of a page has to be delivered in a matter of seconds on the stage.
I think I can speak with a degree of authority… today, the biggest driving force of movies is pace; God help you if you try to put in a scene that is about character and not plot.
But my philosophy is that plot advancement is not what the experience of reading fiction is about. If all we care about is advancing the plot, why read novels? We can just read Cliffs Notes.
Well, it’s my voice, so it’s more accessible that way, and there are also all sorts of things like plot and timelines that are already known entities, so for me, it’s very different from writing fiction.
In comedy, the witty style wins out over every mishap of the plot.
If you let Barnum & Bailey interpret a plot by Stendahl, it might come out to be something like the 1972 Democratic convention.
I love a life whose plot is simple.
The ones [comedies] that I always liked, whether it’s Terms of Endearment, Broadcast News, or Fast Times of Ridgemont High, they were all about two hours, or a little bit over two hours. With that extra 15 or 20 minutes, you can get to real character and you’re not just stuck in plot.
The most important thing in the job is to make movies about women where they are characters that have consequences in the story. They can be villains, they can be protagonists, I don’t care but their movements, their actions what they do in the plot has to actually matter.
Narrativity presumes a special taste for plot. And this taste for plot was always very present in the Anglo-Saxon countries and that explains their high quality of detective novels.
It takes work to plot a course that is both thrilling and truthful, but it’s worth it.
The best bit about having a collaborator is plot. Plot is quite hard to get right. It is a testing intellectual exercise that feels quite different to being in the flow of voice or characterisation. I like having someone to construct a plot with.
I’m not really a plot writer – I’m more interested in the characters and sort of small events that propel the story forward.
I’m just an entertainer. In a way crime stories are boring. A crime’s been committed and at the end you know it will be solved. So you’ve got to make the story interesting besides it just being a plot. And that’s why character matters, why you’ve got to make the characters interesting.
Even if I never sold another book, I’d keep writing, because the stories are here, in my head. Stories that just need to be told. I love watching a plot unfold, and feeling the surprise when the unexpected happens.
I believe that if the story is fleshed out and the characters more believable, the reader is more likely to take the journey with them. In addition, the plot can be more complex. My characters are very real to me, and I want each of my characters to be different.
As regards plots I find real life no help at all. Real life seems to have no plots.
It is easy to be beautiful; it is difficult to appear so. I admire you, beloved, for the trap you’ve set. It’s like a final chapter no one reads because the plot is over.
Estimates are that in 2012, more than 32 million books were available – the explosion, thanks to the ease of self-publishing; 2013 could see even more titles grace our virtual bookstores! That means we are going to be awash in covers and titles, plot descriptions and characters.
Bohemia isn’t somewhere an artist runs to escape society. It’s a place where like-minded artists gather to plot the downfall of dogma and ignorance.
We go to the mountain for enlightenment, for self-realization, for adventure, for discovery. It’s pregnant with meaning. When people see a mountain, they invest it with meaning. Not plot. Not character.
The rule for finding plots for character-centered novels, which is to ask: ‘So what’s the worst possible thing I can do to *this* guy?’ And then do it.
Certain writers look down their noses at plot, and I think I might have been one of them until I tried it.
Nor is there any law more just, than that he who has plotted death shall perish by his own plot.
Good manners, Madam, are had these days not
For your asking, nor mine, nor what-we-used-to-be’s.
The day is a loud grenade that bursts a smile
Of serious weeds in a comic lily plot.
For your asking, nor mine, nor what-we-used-to-be’s.
The day is a loud grenade that bursts a smile
Of serious weeds in a comic lily plot.
I try to write something that would interest anybody and keep them turning the page. You must have a plot and good storyline.
Enjoy the present, plot the progress, you’ll still reach the goal
I came to realize that far more important to me than any plot or conventional sense was the sheer directionality I felt while reading prose, the texture of time as it passed, life’s white machine.
We began to do little things, have little scenes where we just talked about things that had nothing to do with the plot. In fact, in the beginning, they didn’t want us to do that. But as time went on, you see that in so many shows. I think we were the first to do that.
I don’t want to be Batman. Let Val Kilmer do it. I just want to be Uncle Batman. I have this whole ‘warm relationship’ plot in my mind. In the final scenes, the new Batmobile breaks down, the new Batman’s stranded on the side of the road. We grab our old Batmobile, pick him up and drive away.
In writing, I’m totally anti-plans of any kind. All my attempts to plan and plot novels have come to grief, and in expensive ways.
The Monkees was a straight sitcom, we used the same plots that were on the other situation comedies at the time. So the music wasn’t threatening, we weren’t threatening.
My books are primarily plot driven but the best plot in the world is useless if you don’t populate them with characters that readers can care about.
Plot does not simply move with time, but spreads out conceptually in metaphorical space.
When I started ‘Still Missing,’ I had a few key plot points in mind, which I played around with mentally for a couple of months, then one day I just started writing. Not having an outline led to some cool plot twists, but also many rewrites! A lot of the plotting happened on subsequent drafts.
Open Secret boasts a nifty plot and, in Coroner Fortin, a fascinating protagonist who will likely be around for a long time. Deryn Collier is a talent to watch.
You can holler, protest, march, picket and demonstrate, but somebody must be able to sit in on the strategy conferences and plot a course. There must be strategies, the researchers, the professionals to carry out the program. That’s our role.
I always have a basic plot outline, but I like to leave some things to be decided while I write.
My first attraction to writing novels was the plot, that almost extinct animal. Those novels I read which made me want to be a novelist were long, always plotted, novels – not just Victorian novels, but also those of my New England ancestors: Herman Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne.
To honor life, we must be willing to grow through what we don’t know yet, and outgrow what we know no longer fits us. We must be willing to give in to the process, moment by moment, realizing a new plot may be unfolding.
But really, if you ask me, there is only one kid of plot. One. Stuff happens. That’s it.
I always write on unlined typing paper and write the first draft in longhand, using cheap Bic pens. I try to write about four pages a day, which usually yields a first draft in six months. I don’t plot ahead of time, so I’m flying by the seat of my pants for the first draft.
You need to know the characters as living, breathing people before you start the plot; otherwise, you’ll feel panic, anarchy and chaos.
In ‘Pictures from an Institution,’ Randall Jarrell was able to transcend the academic novel by simply ignoring it, writing a comedy with no plot at all beyond his own pleasure in language and humanity itself.
It is fatal to know too much at the outcome: boredom comes as quickly to the traveler who knows his route as to the novelist who is over certain of his plot.
I always start with characters rather than with a plot, which many critics would say is very obvious from the lack of plot in my films – although I think they do have plots – but the plot is not of primary importance to me, the characters are.
So much for endings. Beginnings are always more fun. True connoisseurs, however, are known to favor the stretch in between, since it’s the hardest to do anything with. That’s about all that can be said for plots, which anyway are just one thing after another, a what and a what and a what.
It’s an interesting plot device to enter in a third wheel – it always helps raise the stakes for all parties involved. But often, those characters can be one-dimensional.
With six weeks’ worth of recuperation time, you’ll also be able to see any glaring holes in the plot or character development. And listen–if you spot a few of these big holes, you are forbidden to feel depressed about them or to beat up on yourself. Screw-ups happen to the best of us.
From plots and treasons Heaven preserve my years, But save me most from my petitioners. Unsatiate as the barren womb or grave; God cannot grant so much as they can crave.
I realised that what I loved was descriptive writing rather than something with a plot.
I’ve always been the opposite of a paranoid. I operate as if everyone is part of a plot to enhance my well-being.
Fine wits destroy themselves with their own plots, in meddling with great affairs of state.
Real life seems to have no plots.
Morality for the novelist is expressed not so much in the choice of subject matter as in the plot of the narrative, which is perhaps why in our morally bewildered time novelists have often been timid about plot.
Some of the first infographics I did started off as notes to myself: trying to plot out, for instance, how IP addresses are allocated. After a while, I thought, ‘This is a neat thing I can share with people, and they can follow me along in that process of understanding.’
In other words, you’ve got a journey as the plot, but it has to be in a lively environment, being able to create the mood. If you read “Pickman’s Model,” in other words, they’re winding their way through the Boston Streets and [H.P.] Lovecraft researched what was there.
The world is now multicultural the same way the world is round. It’s not a selling point, it’s not a ‘quirky’ feature, it’s not a cynical marketing ploy, it’s not an artistic statement, it’s not even a plot device. It’s a fact, like seedless grapes.
I don’t plot with huge detail, just big moments and important elements, and then I have a structure but can fly by the seat of my pants when I write.
The audience today has heard every joke. They know every plot. They know where you’re going before you even start. That’s a tough audience to surprise, and a tough audience to write for. It’s much more competitive now, because the audience is so much more – I want to say ‘sophisticated.’
The initial attraction of a political convention was that often the outcome was not preordained. There was at least some element of surprise. But, now it’s like tuning in to a movie where you already know the plot and the ending. It’s just not that interesting.
I’ve always read suspense, so raising the stakes to life and death situations in my romance plots seemed natural.
Terrorist bombers on the left, fascist plots on the right.
Celebrity is a national drama whose characters’ parts and plots are written by the tabloids, gossip columnists, websites and interactive buttons. The famous don’t actually have to turn up to their own lives at all.
I grew up reading SF in the 70s and 80s, and I like fast, thought-provoking plots that take you places in fully realized worlds.
The idea that I’m going to have to sit down to write some fiction where I’m going to have to think of a plot would really scare me, because it would come out a mess.
I thought I could rely on the plot in the novel and fill in the colour between the lines, but I made a mistake with that assumption. It was really, really hard because you pull a few things apart and then you realise how everything relies on everything else and it can all fall apart.
I try not to be too plot-heavy and to balance the dramatic with the comedic.
Authorities in New York City have foiled a plot by terrorists to blow up the Holland Tunnel. There was one awkward moment when officials informed President Bush the Holland Tunnel was safe. Bush then thanked the Dutch authorities for all their help.
In the U.S. – and elsewhere – successful parties need a storyline that voters can relate to, an intelligible plot of some sort, especially now that so many older, formal ideologies have lost force. For proof of this, one has only to look at Margaret Thatcher’s career and ideas.
The concept of writing a novel and not knowing where it’s going – I don’t know how to do that. Novels are plot- and character-driven, so if I don’t know what becomes of people, how can I know where it should begin?
Culture is a plot against the expansion of consciousness.
And I do have one surefire plot I have not and probably never will write because of my fear someone will carry it out.
Part of the reason why so many actors lose the plot when they go over to America is that they become part of an industry, so that’s why they don’t want to play weak, bad or vulnerable guys – because that’s not sellable; that diminishes their profit margin.
Jeff Eastin is good in that he’ll tell me a plot twist that’s coming up if he thinks it would be something Peter would know ahead of time, and if it’s something that would be a surprise to Peter, I’ll tell Jeff, ‘Oh, don’t tell me. I don’t want to know.’ And then it’s exciting to read it and exciting to play it.
I approach an action sequence almost like a mathematical problem. Sometimes you get these action sequences that you read and go, ‘Oh my God, this is huge, how do I do it?’ and I go, ‘Just a step at a time. Sit down and plot each piece of it out.’
I wrote a book called ‘Doll Bones’, which was another middle-grade book, and when I was writing it, I needed a place in the U.S. that made bone china. And there are only two places in the U.S. that make bone china. They made it by grinding down actual cow bones. It was a plot point. It was a creepy doll book.
My stories do have plot. They’re not just scattered language; they’re controlled, toward an end.
I’m very close to my family. Not like these big stars – not mentioning any names – who lose the plot and don’t know who they are.
Once you have invented a character with three dimensions and a voice, you begin to realize that some of the things you’d like him to do to further your plot are things that such a person wouldn’t, or couldn’t, do.
I’m usually a panster and throw ideas down on computer the second they hit my brain. I even had to get off the treadmill to write down my ideas. It’s a great place to ‘zone out’ and think about my plots and characters.
Carney is like a graveyard where everyone already owns their plots and has built houses on top of them.
Plot makes the character just as history makes the man.
My sister and brother are both writers as well. We are constantly discussing story and plot lines. And I love to discuss story ideas with my husband.
I love soap operas – the stories, the plots! And I love the game shows and the courtroom dramas and the detectives – Jessica Fletcher, ‘Columbo,’ ‘Perry Mason,’ ‘L.A. Law.’ Any sense of guilt appeals to me in a television program – a sense of guilt, or a sense of making a lot of money.
Music conveys moods and images. Even in opera, where plots deal with the structure of destiny, it’s music, not words, that provides power.
I find getting the first draft down to be the biggest challenge. Every word, every punctuation mark, every plot point is a decision. It’s much more fun to play with something that already exists.
plot is character in action.
When you are drawing characters to serve a plot purpose, you tend to get flat, stereotyped, unliving characters.
The nation of Dubai banned the movie Charlie’s Angles because it’s “offensive to the religion of Islam.” Apparently, the religion of Islam is offended by anything without a plot.
Sometimes my plot lines are so convoluted, I get calls from friends at 3 am saying; you SOB, you’ll never pull this one off.
I began to write fiction on the assumption that the true enemies of the novel were plot, character, setting and theme, and having once abandoned these familiar ways of thinking about fiction, totality of vision or structure was really all that remained.
Most of the people who were responsible for 9/11 are now in custody or have been killed. But there are others, and they plot and they plan, and they hope to pull it off again. And while we have to be right 100 percent of the time, they only have to be right once. So there’s no way to overreact to that.
Bigotrys birthplace is the sinister back room of the mind where plots and schemes are hatched for the persecution and oppression of other human beings.
Local teenagers killed in a car crash is a suburban legend, a stock plot line.
A risk for a poet-novelist is imbalance: The poems can flatten into prose or lose their intensity of focus; the novels can stall amid lofty writing or literary preciousness and ignore the engine of plot and character.
I’m real bent on dialogue. I’m just a little bit crazy and when you put that along with 20 years as a criminal lawyer, it’s pretty easy to come up with some interesting plots.
There are only so many plots in the world. It’s how they unfold that makes them interesting.
You compare yourself to somebody who you think is a peer, and you can totally lose the plot, and not understand that you are nothing like them in the first place, and it was never you versus anybody.
Wake the power within thee slumbering, trim the plot that’s in thy keeping, thou wilt bless the task when reaping sweet labour’s prize.
There is nothing new, from Greek mythology to Shakespeare to every romcom ever made, we’re just reimagining the same 12 story plots over and over again – so what makes people keep watching and listening? It’s all about the character.
There’s a stigma that guys hate romance and hate love, but that’s not true. Look at ‘Iron Man.’ There’s a whole through-line plot about his relationship with Pepper, and everybody loves it.
I love working fictional characters into a piece of history. It plays to my strengths, which are characterization and dialogue, and assists me in my admitted weakness, plot.
My temper manifests itself when I can’t find something. I could swear that there is a plot against me to put kitchen utensils in the wrong drawers.
Each time I’m starting to work on a film, even if I love to settle the plot in the real world, I start to think about the plot as a fairy tale, or a dream, or a nightmare… As if it was the best way to tell the truth about characters or narration, instead of realism.
I do wish that reviews were less like book reports. There was an era when reviewers had something to say about a book: when they painted context and drew conclusions. Many reviews these days are little more than plot summary.
I like having a plot; I like characters with a reason to get up in the morning.
I like to be surprised. Fresh implications and plot twists erupt as a story unfolds. Characters develop backgrounds, adding depth and feeling. Writing feels like exploring
Life has a very simple plot: first you’re here and then you’re not.
I would love to travel to the future to plot out some things so there’s no more guess work.
Character is the plot in many ways
Plots come to me at such odd moments, when I am walking along the street, or examining a hat shop… suddenly a splendid idea comes into my head.
The thing about Moby Dick is that, at heart, it’s a very simple plot – there’s only one white whale in the ocean. When you’re a boy growing up in a hostile home, you imagine it’s unique: it’s happening only to you.
I don’t plot my books rigidly, follow a preconceived structure. A novel mustn’t be a closed system – it’s a quest.
Every search has its own momentum. It is why a search makes such an excellent plot for a film or story.
If often happens too, both in courts and in cabinets, that there are two things going on together,–a main plot and an under-plot; and he that understands only one of them will, in all probability, be the dupe of both. A mistress may rule a monarch, but some obscure favorite may rule the mistress.
The redemption plot is one of the oldest story shapes.
The high office of the President has been used to foment a plot to destroy the American’s freedom and before I leave office, I must inform the citizens of this plight.
Motivation is the power behind plot.
When we did the first sequel [of the Austin Powers] , it was on coattails of the first one doing so well when it was released on video, so we really didn’t know what to do with the second plot.
I saw the Kino print of ‘The Man From Beyond,’ but apparently a superior new print has been produced by Restored Serials. Maybe a few snippets of missing footage will close up some of the plot holes, but I have my doubts.
Becoming an actor made me way more interested in plot.
Read the classics one hour every day, drunk or sober. Reading the classics gives one a feeling of confidence. It familiarizes one with the vagaries of life. It shows one that there are really no new plots.
I begin by assembling notes on characters. Large swaths of the plot become clear to me as I do this.
Baseball is a soap opera that plays out day after day, one that a lot of elderly women watch until the characters and the plot becomes a part of their life. She got to enjoy the personal side of the players. They were her kids. The Braves were her family.
It’s just about trying to find material where I’m doing more than just being a plot device. I want to actually get to do scenes that go to interesting places and are challenging to me.
It’s hard to write a good plot, it’s very hard.
I love the Shakespeare history plays; I love the struggle for the crown as a plot.
I look for material that both interest me and challenges me. If I am drawn to the material and I have to work hard at it, the characters and the plots reflect the hours and hours of research.
The person you are (in total, at that moment in time) is what creates the story you’re writing. It’s infused in every piece of punctuation, in the plot, in the most minor character who crosses the page. It’s all your voice.
Back in my 20s, when I wrote ‘A Place of Greater Safety,’ the French Revolution novel, I thought, ‘I’ll always have to write historical novels because I can’t do plots.” But in the six years of writing that novel, I actually learned to write, to invent things.
The woeful tales of ‘Super Mario Bros.’ and ‘Street Fighter’ have taught studios that merely slapping a name to a movie is not enough to bring in the fans of the franchise. Also, the way games now unfold their stories more parallels that of a movie, with characters and plot points actually meaning as much as a high score.
Plot is people. Human emotions and desires founded on the realities of life, working at cross purposes, getting hotter and fiercer as they strike against each other until finally there’s an explosion-that’s Plot.
It is scary for an actor when you get hired as a lead. No matter what the plot is, it is your job to do something interesting enough to make them want to get inside the lead character’s head.
If you let the plot be determined by what you feel is in the character’s mind at that point, it may not turn out to be a very good play, but at least it will be a play where people are behaving in a kind of truthful way.
I better make the plot good. I wanted to make it grip people on the first page and have a big turning point in the middle, as there is, and construct the whole thing like a bit of a roller coaster ride…
While problems in a film are fairly easy to identify, the sources of those problems are often extraordinarily difficult to assess. A mystifying plot twist or a less-than-credible change of heart in our main character is often caused by subtle underlying issues elsewhere in the story.
The thing that I love is human behavior – why people do what they do, who they are, and the choices that they make – and that has to always be plot driven.
My husband makes fun of me, because I know I can use strong prose to jazz-hand my way through plot that isn’t as interesting as I’d like it to be.
Most of us live in a fog. It’s like life is a movie we arrived to 20 minutes late. You know something important seems to be going on. But we can’t figure out the story. We don’t know what part we’re supposed to play or what the plot is.
The meek shall inherit the earth – a 6 foot plot above them.
Storytelling is ultimately a creative act of pattern recognition. Through characters, plot and setting, a writer creates places where previously invisible truths become visible. Or the storyteller posits a series of dots that the reader can connect.
Nothing aids which may not also injure us.
Fire serves us well, but he who plots to burn
His neighbor’s roof arms his hands with fire.
Fire serves us well, but he who plots to burn
His neighbor’s roof arms his hands with fire.
When the reader and one narrator know something the other narrator does not, the opportunities for suspense and plot development and the shifting of reader sympathies get really interesting.
Countries across the world are taking action now to help them track paedophiles and terrorists who abuse new technology to plot their horrific crimes.
Any plot you impose on your characters will be onomatopoetic: PLOT. I say don’t worry about plot. Worry about the characters. Let what they say or do reveal who they are, and be involved in their lives, and keep asking yourself, Now what happens? The development of relationship creates plot.
The one thing I would like more credit for is being part of a movement which involves recognising the importance of plot and asserting that books of literary worth could be written that had plots.
Use plot to buttress a story.
I sit in my room at my desk, looking out the window to the yard and waiting for a plot to come to me, to rise slowly in my mind.
I want my mom on ‘Scream Queens’. She could play someone who is convinced she’s Princess Leila. That could be her disease, and then as a plot twist, we could find out that she actually is Princess Leila.
No unemployment insurance can be compared to an alliance between a man and a plot of land.
While I’ve written in the POV (point of view) of adolescent characters before… I never have had to create novels in which those characters not only drive the plot, but also are instrumental in resolving whatever issue the plot deals with.
You can’t have a movie with a group of people that are significant players in the story, that push forward the plot, without introducing at least one or two of them.
When you’re telling taut, tight storytelling that has any kind of built-in plot twist elements, you tend to want to stack everything up on top of itself as opposed to letting things breathe and be languid in terms of the passage of time.
I start with a beat sheet, which is more of an abbreviated outline. It hits all the major plot points. From there, I move to note cards. But the most important part of my process is my inspiration board.
At any comic book convention in America, you’ll find aspiring cartoonists with dozens of complex plot ideas and armloads of character sketches. Only a small percentage ever move from those ideas and sketches to a finished book.
Spy plots are hard, really hard.
It is possible to combine a story line and plot line in the same work. Usually the storylines comes first, serving as a background to the plot line, but not always.
When you describe a character’s dream, it has to be sharper than reality in some way and more meaningful. It has to somehow speak to plot, character, and all the rest.
The subject of a novel is not the plot. Who remembers what happened to Lucien de Rebempre in the end?
Baseball is a team game but, at the same time, it’s a very lonely game: unlike in soccer or basketball, where players roam around, in baseball everyone has their little plot of the field to tend. When the action comes to you, the spotlight is on you but no one can help you.
I love writing and do not know why it is considered such a difficult, agonizing profession. I love all of it, thinking up the plots, getting to know the kids in the story, their parents, backyards, pizza toppings.
Plot is the knowing of destination.
Suspense films are often based on communication problems, and that affects all of the plot points. It almost gives it kind of a fable feeling.
Hindi film music has always been completely driven by the plot. We singers never had any say in compositions.
I plot the par 5s back from the green and make my plan. If I can reach the green in two shots, I’m going to be aggressive off the tee. But if ‘s a three-shot hole, the goal changes. You want to put yourself in position to hit your favorite shot to the green.
Anyone who has ever tried to plot a detective mystery knows that the hardest thing to come up with is motive.
I keep losing and regaining my equilibrium, which is the basic plot of all popular fiction. And I myself am a work of fiction.
I really don’t care about plot. I really, really don’t.
Normally you read a screenplay – and I read a lot of them – and the characters don’t feel like people. They feel like plot devices or cliches or stereotypes.
The reason I collect good ideas is because plots themselves are very difficult indeed to come by.
I don’t go to see movies to see plots. I’m not interested in puzzles like an Agatha Christie story.
Now up and atom it’s on, I was raised to be strong, and mama told me be a thug since the day I was born. The fame was a plot to try a change me, and what’s strange is nobody knew my name.
We tolerate differences of opinion in people who are familiar to us. But differences of opinion in people we do not know sound like heresy or plots.
I always have one or two, sometimes more, Navajo or other tribes’ cultural elements in mind when I start a plot. In Thief of Time, I wanted to make readers aware of Navajo attitude toward the dead, respect for burial sites.
If you were to plot my success or failure, it goes, it very seldom stays on a high plateau.
I think as soon as you start believing you’re doing something superior to other people, then you start losing the plot.
I think that sometimes, romantic comedies have to be really broad, and that the plot of people falling in and out of love or whatever is not enough. Enough Said had that stuff, but I wanted it to be fun and funny while also grounded in reality.
No good opera plot can be sensible, for people do not sing when they are feeling sensible.
I was lucky because logarithmic plots are a device of the devil.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a completely ad hoc plot device.
Just as a gardener must tend his or her plot, keeping out the weeds, you must tend the garden of your mind, weeding out the thoughts of lack, limitation, and negativity. You must nurture and tend the thoughts of happiness, success, and purpose.
Truth may be stranger than fiction on a plot and narrative basis, but fiction can investigate tone in a way that things based on a true story can’t.
All great rebellions are born of private acts of civil disobedience that inspire rebel bands to plot together.
My key interest in choosing scripts is character-driven stories, because there are so many stories that sacrifice character for plot.
The queen of crime, Agatha Christie, was always more concerned about the clockwork cleverness of the plot, never the investigator.
What I have to outline is action and plot because I’m not particularly good at that.
I always struggle with making the technical aspects of the plot fit with the story that’s unfolding in my imagination.
The romance is the primary plot in a story that has two plots. The second plot is not a subplot, but one that is interwoven with the romance plot (if that makes sense.) A story needs compelling characters in a compelling plot.
I’m one of the lucky writers: plots come easily to me
I was attempting to write the story of my life. It wasn’t so much about plot. It was much more about character.
I am done with the cliched heroine roles. I can’t go to work without a challenge. I want to do films that drive me, films in which I am a part of the main plot.
Maybe I should have taken a few chances. That’s not to say I want to go make Star Wars, but I need to shift my career into the studio world. That’s where my head was at when I thought of the original plot.
The argument that the countries use for the sheer increase in Muslim doctors is the sheer increase in the Muslim population. In for example Birmingham, England where a lot of these guys came from, where one of these plots was hatched, it’s up to 30% of the population. Maybe that’s the problem?
All fiction is about people, unless it’s about rabbits pretending to be people. It’s all essentially characters in action, which means characters moving through time and changes taking place, and that’s what we call ‘the plot’.
My friend Ian Hagemann, a regular at Wiscon, once said on a panel that when he reads science fiction futures that are full of white people and no one else, he wonders when the race war happened that wiped out the majority of the human race, and why the writer hasn’t mentioned such an important plot point.
The character’s attitude is more important than plot.
I definitely feel that plot flows from character. I dont believe that you can construct a plot and insert people into it.
The writer must face the fact that ordinary lives are what most people live most of the time, and that the novel as a narration of the fantastic and the adventurous is really an escapist plot; that aesthetically, the ordinary, the banal, is what you must deal with.
I was born in the era of the novel. I’ve written many, as well as collections of poetry, and essays for mouthing off. I’ve written to inches, word-counts, page-counts, even the sonnet and the screenplay (which I call a plot poem). I write narrative. That’s it. I just want to tell it.
The first time I re-discovered the joy of watching an action movie was when I saw ‘Die Hard.’ It was a completely simple plot – a guy goes to meet his wife, and the building gets taken over by terrorists – but I was completely blown away. Great characters, and it moved along really fast.
Gritty and witty, The Chicago Way is done the classic Raymond Chandler Way. Harvey’s taut plot, snappy prose, and memorable characters make this debut novel a real winner.
Cynicism doesn’t have its way in series finales. My emotional desire when I watch a series come to an end is to be crying and laughing and cheering as the final credits roll, feeling like I just got delivered the happy ending, whether the plot ends happily or not.
In comedy writing, a sitcom plot is basically the same thing: What’s the worst thing that could happen? But you’re playing it for comic effect. It’s a similar muscle being used with Black Mirror.
We live in the world of images, but we also live in the world of the Internet, of zapping and where people move. You can make little videos on your phone. I love very composed images, but the idea of moving pictures with a story, with a plot is quite interesting, too.
Sometimes, I have themes that interest me or that touch on larger issues but, really, I’m just trying to figure out the plot, or how the characters work. I’m trying to make the best story I possibly can.
I think I made a mistake with [Jane] Austen by reading all six in a row. There are similarities to the plots so by the time I got to the last one I could anticipate what was happening too easily. But her characterizations are amazing.
In musical theater, if you have a song, it has to advance the plot. If you have a song in a musical and it does not advance the plot, it gets dropped.
I keep an elaborate calendar for my characters detailing on which dates everything happens. I’m constantly revising this as I go along. It gives me the freedom to intricately plot my story, knowing it will at least hold up on a timeline.
My favorite films are the ones that I walk away from and I know I saw a story. I saw the core part of the plot. But if I ever take another look at it then I can see that there was some more stuff going on in there that I didn’t realize.
I do not believe evil men are led by God. I believe there are plots of evil. We live in a sinful world, and there are a lot of things that happen as a result of sin.
When I would create a dance, I wouldn’t have the luxury that ballet people do when they take a piece of music and impose a dance upon it. What we did in motion pictures was have a song and within that song try to elaborate. My usual method was to do what a writer does: get a plot.
The plot details of B movies are irrational: accept that people do things that are contradictory, against their own best interests, have short term aims & limited attention span, and do incredibly stupid things while things blow up. Apart from things blowing up, this is just like the music industry.
It was a basic plot in any number of her books: girl strikes out, makes good, finds love, gets revenge. In that order. The making good and striking out part I liked. The rest would just be bonus.
I think with musicals, it’s much more part of the script. They don’t want songs that would stop the show; they need songs that keep the plot moving.
As long as the plots keep arriving from outer space, I’ll go on with my virgins.
Personally, my taste is towards development of a character, as well as the resolution of a story plot. I like to find both, if I can.
Typically in horror films the character just services the plot, and you really are just going from ‘point a’ to ‘point b,’ just so that you can end up at ‘point c.’ They are just sort of stick characters. That’s just not interesting to me.
Shakespeare, who never could think up a plot by himself, found this one [Macbeth] in Holinshed’s Chronicles, changing it just enough so that no one would recognize the source. He didn’t count on the resourcefulness of modern scholars, who have to discover things like this to become associate professors.
I think ‘The Avengers’ is a Black Widow movie. She saves the day. And if you take her out, the plot does not function.
The whole saas-bahu drama is very cliched. I feel there’s already too much of that on TV. So I was waiting for something like ‘Kuch Rang Pyar Ke Aise Bhi.’ The show offered a fresh and interesting plot.
God is the larger context and plot in which our stories find themselves.
In ‘The Grandmaster,’ I had a supporting role, but my character in ‘The Crossing’ is much more central to the plot.
All we think about is how to keep the audience engaged, and normally we’re big on plot because that’s the easy way to do it.
I like the plot of The Nutcracker – not at all.
I think I was annoyed going through the ’90s just as a guy who loves music. There wasn’t a lot of music for me. Everything was groove driven. We lost the plot with the melody. There’s no more melody.
If you need a certain vitality you can only supply it yourself, or there comes a point, anyway, when no one’s actions but your own seem dramatically convincing and justifiable in the plot that the number of your days concocts.
I don’t really write plots. I use history as the engine that drives everything.
The way I express ideas is through the plot, Suspense is an important part of expressing an idea.
In economics, unlike fiction and the theater, there is no harm in a premature disclosure of the plot: it is to see the changes just mentioned and others as an interlocked whole.
Most conspiracy theorists dont understand this. But if there really were a CIA plot, no documents would exist.
I’ve always had a big voice, but I’m very aware of when you need to belt or go all out like that – when it’s necessary and plot driven – as opposed to just screaming to scream, which I hate.
Games, by nature, have more plot options and non-linear qualities than TV and film.
This means keeping many trails open at once, inevitably requiring a fairly ‘parallel’ plot. This plot should be discovered rather than announced, so show, don’t tell.
I write where I can see things happen, and then things get glued together. I do have the final scene, but that really is an epilogue. It’s not part of the plot.
This blessГЁd plot, this earth, this realm, this England
This nurse, this teeming womb of royal kings,
. . .
This land of such dear souls, this dear dear land.
This nurse, this teeming womb of royal kings,
. . .
This land of such dear souls, this dear dear land.
I have to plot my path to greatness.
As one of my creative writing professors once said, there are only seven plots. What makes those plots different is how you handle them, your voice, your style, and your way of thinking. That’s all. People can mimic your style, but they can never achieve your unique point of view.
[Gertrude Stein] really needed someone like Virgil Thomson, whom she respected, to sit on her a bit and make her devise some plot.
I retain characters more often than plot, but what seems to happen is that I latch on to specific moments, turns of phrase, and dialogue as touchstones for me to recall what happened in the book. Kind of like freeze-frame.
You keep waiting for the moral of your life to become obvious, but it never does. Work, work, work: No moral. No plot. No eureka! Just production schedules and days. You might as well be living inside a photocopier. Your lives are all they’re ever going to be.
I was so obsessed by Lisbeth Salander and all the characters, but of course if you’re going to write a crime novel worthy of Stieg Larsson, you need a plot, don’t you?
This book has too much plot and not enough story.
I’m certainly a plot and character man. Themes, structure, style – they’re valid components of a novel and you can’t complete the book without them. But I think what propels me as a reader is plot and character.
The westward march has stopped, upon the final plains of the Pacific; and now the plot thickenswith the change, the pause, the settlement, our people draw into closer groups, stand face to face, to know each other and be known.
I believe the most intricate plot won’t matter much to readers if they don’t care about the characters, especially in a series. So I try to focus hard on making each character, whether villain or hero, have an interesting flaw that readers can relate to.
Surely it was time someone invented a new plot, or that the author came out from the bushes.
Any writer would rather dig into character than dig into fancy plots.
Giving consumers the choice of having it all in one big bite means different viewers are in many different places in the book, making it hard to discuss without spoiling the plot. The intervals between first-run programming provide a space for communion and that tantalizing sense of anticipation.
Put a man and a girl on stage and there is already a story; a man and two girls, there’s already a plot.
As regards plot I find real life no help at all. Real life seems to have no plots. And as I think a plot desirable and almost necessary, I have this extra grudge against life.
The books people are writing today, they’re too long. You get a little bit of plot, and then pages and pages of Creative Writing. They teach classes in how to do this. They should teach classes in how to stop!
Plot is tremendously important to me: I can’t stand books where nothing happens, and I can’t imagine ever writing a novel without at least one murder.
[Ivy Wilkes] loves [Georgia] O’Keeffe’s work, but is not satisfied by just looking at the paintings; she wants the painting to be her own. The plot grew naturally out of Ivy’s personality (and flaws).
The drive . . . is to create a one world government … Do I mean conspiracy? Yes I do. I am convinced there is such a plot, international in scope . . . .
Things live and die, and then someone processes them into edible portions. This is a complete telling of the story, ‘Food.’ The basic plot hasn’t changed for centuries. I shouldn’t need to know any more details, any more history, in order to decide if my food tastes good or not.
If you can remove a female character from your plot and replace her with a sexy lamp and your story still works, you’re a hack.
Once you’ve got a concept and a sense of themes and what it’s about, then you can start to add your plot and sort of Tetris in all of the elements that you want to see, but also attach them to something that has cohesion, like a mold.
They plot, they plot, sleeping or afoot they never let up.
I try not to divide plot and character. I get to know a character by what they want and fear and how those internal forces play out in their lives.
Grief doesn’t have a plot. It isn’t smooth. There is no beginning and middle and end.
Notoriously, in 1975, Murdoch abused his position as a newspaper owner to support a plot that ousted the democratically elected prime minister of Australia, Gough Whitlam, who had dared to wander away from the mogul’s path.
Mary awoke from her nightmare with a pounding heart, convinced that she had only imagined Elizabeth’s cruel plot. A full moon was shining into her chamber, illuminating everything around her in silvery light. That was when she noticed for the first time that there were bars on her window.
I couldn’t resist hiding some historical details and a few clues relevant to the plot and characters of ‘A Discovery of Witches’ throughout the pages of the novel.
Plots and character don’t make life. Life is here and now, anytime you say the word, anytime you let her rip.
I think, when I was younger, I believed in – and yearned for – conventional beauty. I thought there was a spectrum from ugly to beautiful, and that you could objectively plot everyone you saw along it.
I studied Hitchcock and Josef von Sternberg under Richard Dillard at Hollins, and that year under his tutelage just completely rewired my brain. Both directors combine moral seriousness with great artistry and, certainly in Hitchcock’s case, an enormous respect for plot, for its power to enthrall and delight.
Men will gamble and plot and fight and fall, all for the winning of a trophy. A woman’s heart, a piece of land, a kingdom, a lordship, a contract, a ship, an egg — it hardly matters the which or the what, as soon as it is seen to be desired by one, another will make a prize of it.
It’s easy now, now that it’s a story. When you were going through it, it was life. Always much harder to get the plot line on.
Sitcom writing is difficult because it’s not just about writing jokes – there’s a very fine balance between characters, plot, and comedy, that if you get one thing wrong, the whole castle comes falling down.
I think invariably when you are dealing with relationships, the films really center on that, and the plot is really born out of that. That’s the most core part of a relationship: intimacy, I think, whether it’s expressed or not.
He that seeketh to be eminent amongst able men hath a great task; but that is ever good for the public. But he that plots to be the only figure amongst ciphers is the decay of a whole age.
DePaul’s plot to deny me tenure had nothing to do with my faults. In fact, and ironically, it viciously attacked me and destroyed my career because of my virtues. Which, although few in number, they still found threatening.
A writing teacher once told me that the most successful movies and books were simple plots about complex characters. You should be able to articulate your concept in a couple of lines.
Writing is truly a creative art – putting word to a blank piece of paper and ending up with a full-fledged story rife with character and plot.
Sometimes, by using the most over-the-top, ridiculous plot device you can imagine, you get some interesting little conflicts and cool things that you might not otherwise have a chance to explore.
A meal can be thought of as a ritual and a work of art, with limits laid down, desires aroused and fulfilled, enticements, variety, patterning and plot. As in a work of art, not only the overall form, but also the details matter intensely.
Not only a great game, ‘Uncharted 2’ raised the bar for storytelling for the medium. The game treated action as a part of the overall story rather than a way to move from plot point to plot point.
Without conflict there is no plot, without hope there is no story
Because the kind of nonfiction I write has a plot, the events and transactions that make up a life, nonfiction offers me a break from plotting.
The craft of writing is all the stuff that you can learn through school; go to workshops and read books. Learn characterization, plot and dialogue and pacing and word choice and point of view. Then there’s also the art of it which is sort of the unknown, the inspiration, the stuff that is noncerebral.
I’m just giving you some spiel, the ludicrous plot of a novel, a story I invented to touch your heart—one-third bullshit, one-third booze, and one-third genuine tenderness, you know the kind of thing.
Younger people have greatest fears. Why is that? Because they don’t know the plot. They don’t know their own individual plot… they don’t know what’s going to happen to them.
One of the issues with the fight scene – especially with actors – is that when the adrenaline gets going you lose the plot. Before you know it, you’ve hit somebody and you’ve hit them harder than you meant to.
I do read P.D. James because she pays much more attention to character, to a particular atmosphere or setting. But most mystery writers, I think, are controlled by the plot.
In Fascism, if you were a Jew, you were simply killed. Nobody had the idea of arresting Jews and torturing them to confess the Jewish plot. Because in Fascism, you are guilty for your whole being.
I enjoyed doing the gag covers better than the story ones because they were usually simpler. A cover based on an incident in the plot took a great deal of staging to tell a little story that was still part of the book. And it had to make sense on its own.
Life compulsively dangled the possibility of life. Life, the dramatist on speed. Life, that couldn’t stop with its foreshadows and ironies and symbols and clues, its wretched jokes and false endings and twists. Life with its hopeless addiction to plot.
I want a state funeral with bells ringing across the land! Then I’d love the congregation to do the hokey cokey and for can-can girls to dance down the aisle. I’ve already bought the plot in Worcestershire next to my parents.
When I write my novels I don’t really have a huge plan beforehand; I don’t have the whole plot and architecture, so the story is sort of discovered as I write it.
Not counting Small Steps, I think Holes is my best book, in terms of plot, and setting, and the way the story revealed itself. It hasn’t changed my life, other than that I have more money than I did before I wrote it. I’m still too close to Small Steps to compare it to Holes.
A plot is two dogs and one bone.
I’m attracted to people who work their little plot of land and cultivate it and cultivate it.
For me, the lives of children and teens are interesting – they are always changing. There’s just so much to sort through. All of this makes for good plots and complex characters.
Regarding themselves as irreplaceable, both Lenin and Stalin tried in different ways to destroy their successors – Lenin through a testament that attacked Stalin and Trotsky, Stalin through purges culminating in the Doctors’ Plot of 1953.
You have the capacity to change the plot line of your life, even if you’ve been acting from the same script since before you can remember. No matter what has happened up to this point, you have the right and the capacity to be happy. You are an innately creative being, capable of writing a love story worth living.
I always begin with a source of inspiration that comes from nature. The story comes from my research, volunteering, and meeting the people involved in that story world. I am an intuitive writer and an image, sound, experience can all inspire a scene or a plot twist!
I have never believed that there is a secret United Nations plot to take over the US… But, for the first time in my life, I think the formation of some sort of world government is plausible.
I wrote four novels under the name Amy Silver. The first one was commissioned, and I was given basically the whole plot and the characters. They told me what to do, and I went straight away and did it. After that, I continued, and I was coming up with more my own ideas, although they did steer me.
In silent films, quite complex plots are built around action, setting, and the actors’ gestures and facial expressions, with a very few storyboards to nail down specific plot points.
Since Queens is the most ethnically diverse plot of land on Earth, we had tenants from all over the globe. The whole world in one building.
In ‘Zombieland,’ it was such a freewheeling plot it almost didn’t matter what the characters were doing scene to scene as long as there was a consistent banter.
Did you ever see Cheech and Chong’s Up in Smoke? That’s what happens if you really smoke weed and make a movie. You get two guys and no plot and it’s basically like, ‘Yeah! Let’s drive a van made of weed!’ And that’s pretty much the movie.
Objective truth itself is sometimes often seen as a right wing Republican-Christian plot to take over the government (though the rhetoric is cleverer than that, that’s the bottom line).
A free and prosperous Iraq will be a major blow to the terrorists and their desire to establish a safe haven in Iraq where they can plan and plot attacks.
Some people will always ground themselves very strongly in a piece of soil, a grandmother’s property, a tiny plot of land, and that’s great. But in the Age of Movement, there’s no question that the number of people who don’t – or can’t – is growing exponentially.
Once a novel gets going and I know it is viable, I don’t then worry about plot or themes. These things will come in almost automatically because the characters are now pulling the story.
The film ‘The Queen’ came about with a producer saying to me that he wanted me to write about the circumstances behind Diana’s death. I think he was hoping that I would come up with some journalistic scoop that would identify an MI5 covert plot.
Man is eminently a storyteller. His search for a purpose, a cause, an ideal, a mission and the like is largely a search for a plot and a pattern in the development of his life story – a story that is basically without meaning or pattern.
This is all thousands of years old. It’s the same the world over. Anyone who has ever walked upright has loved beer, celebrated over it, told talks over it, hatched plots over it, courted over it. It’s what we do as a species. It’s what makes us human. We brew.
Working on the plot/story idea for my next novel … It always takes time.
Dialogue is character and character is plot.
Characters are incredibly important, but I tend to build them around the plot during the outline stage. However, once I’m writing the manuscript, the characters I’m writing dictate how the plot unfolds.
One great part of every human existence is passed in a state which cannot be rendered sensible by the use of wideawake language, cutanddry grammar and goahead plot.
I tend to favour films that have multiple plot and story lines, multiple characters and ensemble pieces.
Plot is not my forte. It’s like I have to live in my head in the book for a while before I figure out what the story is… My process is a bit messier.
Characters should on the whole, be under rather than over articulate. What they intend to say should be more evident, more striking (because of its greater inner importance to the plot) than what they arrive at saying.
I love to have real people of history interact with my fictional characters. History gives me the plot. I research the period meticulously, and then I blend in a romantic and sensual love story to give it balance. The heavier the history, the more romantic the couple must be.
Mr. Chairman, on September 11, we were attacked by terrorists who took advantage of weaknesses in our border security. After infiltrating our country, the terrorists were able to conceal their real identities, and thereby plot their attacks without fear of being apprehended.
A human being needs only a small plot of ground on which to be happy, and even less to lie beneath.
Night Owls is a fast, fun read that kept me turning the pages. Lauren M. Roy delivers a plot that zips, dialogue that zings, and a cast of characters you’ll cheer for to the very end. Thumbs up!
I always design a landscape with fixed horizons whether it be mountains or a stone wall around a 20-foot-square plot.
Plot is no more than footprints left in the snow after your characters have run by on their way to incredible destinations.
I am a firm believer that a good plot makes for a fun enough read, but it’s not what binds us. If we don’t care about the characters, we won’t care – not in a lasting way – about what’s happening to them.
A two-hour movie tends to be a plot-delivery device; you tend to have to introduce all the characters, say what the goal is, and then get there with a setback, but that’s not really how life is or what a story necessarily wants to be.
Show me where Stalin is buried and I’ll show you a Communist Plot.
I never make a note of anything; I never even write a plot down.
Plots are artificial. Does your life have a plot? It has characters. There is a narrative. There’s a lot of story, a lot of character. But plot? Eh, no.
I saw ‘The Help’ on DVD. I was blown away by Viola Davis: she really straddled that fine line in the plot between what was tragic and what was heart-warming.
A president of the United States, again, has to bring people together, have a position. We need to be able to penetrate these people when they are involved in these plots and these plans. And we have to give the local authorities the ability to penetrate to disrupt. That’s what we need to do.
What interests me about fiction is plot. And what interests me about plot is whether someone tells a story that moves me within the constraints of storytelling. And I have narrowly defined storytelling.
Ultimately every trick succeeds or fails with an audience because of its plot.
The characters are the plot. What they do and say and the things that happen to them are, in a sense, what the plot is. You can’t take character and plot apart from each other, really.
After preliminary research, I zero in on an idea, and then I spend at least four months exploring the topic and in plot-building. I jot down every single detail of the plot as bullet points per chapter, and only when the skeleton is complete do I start writing.
I don’t think plot as a plot means much today. I’d say that everybody has seen every plot twenty times. What they haven’t seen is characters and their relation to one another. I don’t worry much about plot anymore.
In silent films, quite complex plots are built around action, setting, and the actors gestures and facial expressions, with a very few storyboards to nail down specific plot points.
New dramatic writing has banished conversational dialogue from the stage as a relic of dramaturgy based on conflict and exchange: any story, intrigue or plot that is too neatly tied up is suspect.
I never make notes; just a few small details when I’m writing, but nothing much. The plot is never written down. I will tell the story to myself, but I won’t plan it. I’ll speak the narrative in my head for a while.
Basic Instinct 2′ is an uneasy experience because, although it is hyper-reflexive to the point where it is hard to think of one character, one scene, one plot twist that isn’t a reference or an echo, there is nothing knowing about it. No matter how absurd the film gets, it refuses to raise its eyebrows.
One difference between film noir and more straightforward crime pictures is that noir is more open to human flaws and likes to embed them in twisty plot lines.
I never plot out my novels in terms of the tone of the book. Hopefully, once a story is begun it reveals itself
I think screenwriting gave me more of an affinity for plot – my first novel, ‘Me and Earl and the Dying Girl,’ doesn’t have a very sophisticated roadmap. But screenwriting required me to learn a higher level of plottiness, and I tried to bring that to ‘The Haters.’
In ‘Law & Order,’ your main job is to stay out of the way of the plot. On another show you’d receive your script and see stuff that seems challenging and feel excited that the writers thought highly enough of you to write it for you.
Now, what does a vampire do with a computer? Keep track of investments? Send e-mail to other vampires as you all plot to take over the world?” “I spend a lot of time on Wikipedia making corrections to the entries of historical figures I’ve known.” I blinked at him. “Really?” “No, Kitty. That was a joke.
Plots are no more exhausted than men are. Every man is a new creation, and combinations are simply endless.
An action movie should, like any other, follow the narrative traditions of literature. That means there should be subtlety, a slow build and a gradual bringing together of all the separate threads of the plot. To see all of it coming together slowly is very rewarding for the audience.
When a book is just a plot, you know, two men fight for the love of a woman in a wild frontier, I immediately ask, ‘Why?’
All plot comes from the character’s trying to get something, to achieve something, wanting, desiring, longing.
Government should work to insure the rights of the individual, not plot to take them away.
Whenever I leave home to film, my wife Marina gets terrified that I’m going to come back having bought a tiny plot of land in rural Alaska.
The conventional Aristotelian plot proceeds by means of a protagonist, an antagonist, and a series of events comprising a rising action, climax and denouement.
The dominant metaphor of conceptual relativism, that of differing points of view, seems to betray an underlying paradox. Differentpoints of view make sense, but only if there is a common co-ordinate system on which to plot them; yet the existence of a common system belies the claim of dramatic incomparability.
I enjoy it too much – even if I knew I’d never get a book published, I would still write. I enjoy the experience of getting thoughts and ideas and plots and characters organised into this narrative framework.
Conflict is the place where character and plot intersect.
Character is half the reason we read. We’re excited because of the plot, but we care because of the characters.
Plot is merely the mechanism by which your character is forced up against her deepest fears and desires.
The problem with being grounded is it gives you a whole lot of unavoidable time to think. NOt even pulling weeds can take away your ability to plot all the varied and wonderful things you might do to get even, or at least to make up, just get a smidgen for time lost to TV and yard work and house cleaning.
Story is honorable and trustworthy; plot is shifty, and best kept under house arrest.
Just because we have won victory, we must never relax our vigilance against the frenzied plots for revenge by the imperialists and their running dogs. Whoever relaxes vigilance will disarm himself politically and land himself in a passive position.
One of my fave TV shows is Into the Badlands because martial arts staged well and magically and saturated colours and eye candy and coherent plot and world building. It has a strong diverse cast.
Throughout the three decades preceding the Civil War, the anticlerical ethos of the radical abolitionists was used against them by religious opponents of emancipation, who . . . even described abolitionism itself as an atheist plot.
Movies are all about plot. Theater, even if it’s story heavy, it’s about ideas.
There are so many things we have not seen in ‘Spider-Man’ yet… I want to use bad guys never seen in movies. The first films were so traditional and so scrupulously followed the character’s classic plot… So there’s a lot of stuff left in stock. ‘The Clone Saga,’ for example.
I started natural farming after the war with just one small plot, but gradually I acquired additional acreage by taking over surrounding pieces of abandoned land and caring for them by hand.
Your life will have chapters, complete with crazy characters, villains and a plot you can’t even imagine as you sit here today. It’s a lot like a Scooby Doo episode.
And much of Madness, and more of Sin,
And Horror the soul of the plot.
And Horror the soul of the plot.
The Carrie in the plot was too much like the Carrie in the book. She smoked, she swore a lot, she was very hard, very cynical. I could never have pulled it off.
So somehow, things that seem extraneous to the play in reality are not. The scene lasts 37 minutes, and you only need 12 minutes of that for the plot. But if you pull the rest of it out, it’s not my play.
Part of the plot was a knock that V wanted to bring down the government and bring chaos. I don’t know why I thought of Guy Fawkes, because it was during the summer. I thought that would be great if he looked like Guy Fawkes, kind of theatrical.
I start ‘The Code Book’ with the story of Mary Queen of Scots and the Babington Plot, which was foiled when Mary’s enciphered messages fell into the hands of Elizabeth I’s codebreakers.
Literary novelists who have a strong handle on plot are often characterized as good vacation reads because they manage to transport you elsewhere, away from the petty facts of ordinary life.
Sometimes I feel that the world is made up of sensible people who know the plot and bloody idiots who don’t.
He who plots to hurt others often hurts himself.
The villain drives the plot.
So I work hard to present the human side of my characters while not neglecting the plot.
You go to the marketplace and there are seventeen consciousnesses moving in and out. Sometimes you want the same shirt that I want, and our thought bubbles collide a bit and that makes plot.
It’s one of the most liberating things I experience in writing – letting yourself get rid of a gesture or character or plot point that always nagged, even if you couldn’t admit to yourself that it did.
The NSA is not listening to anyone’s phone calls. They’re not reading any Americans’ e-mails. They’re collecting simply the data that your phone company already has, and which you don’t have a reasonable expectation of privacy, so they can search that data quickly in the event of a terrorist plot.
I like to be surprised. Fresh implications and plot twists erupt as a story unfolds. Characters develop backgrounds, adding depth and feeling. Writing feels like exploring.
This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England.
People have really long attention spans, and they love complicated plots. TV series are giving the audience what they want.
There is a limited number of plots. There is no limit to the number of stories.
I have my tombstone already. A tombstone company in the East gave it to me when I jumped Snake Canyon. My plot is in Montana.
In winter, I plot and plan. In spring, I move.
People see their own lives as stories; a lifelong story with a single hero or heroine… much contemporary unhappiness is due to the fact that people in high tech societies receive neither strong myths and stories from their culture nor the ability to construct their own… they lose the plot.
I can’t imagine otherwise – I guess Virginia Woolf could write wonderful novels where the women never have sex, and her novels work. But for me, I don’t think I could write a plot without sex happening somewhere.
He that plots to be the only figure among ciphers [zeros], is the decay of the whole age.
I never map things out in advance. It would be better if I did and more economical in terms of time, but I’ve found that if you work out a plot line from beginning to end, at the beginning it becomes very rational.
In a novel, the biggest symbiosis exists between plot and character. In a song, it would be the lyrics and the melody.
To me, action has to come from the plot.
I suppose it’s possible that a writer would have feeling for his characters, but I can’t see how, because writing is such a meticulous, intricate, technical business. I wish I could say that I love my characters and that frequently they take over the book and run away with the plot and so on. But they don’t exist.
When we try to push the envelope, there are certain sectors of society that say this is a Zionist plot to sort of destabilize our country, or this is an American agenda.
[On Edna Ferber’s Ice Palace] … the book, which is going to be a movie, has the plot and characters of a book which is going to be a movie.
Mammootty came on board unexpectedly. ‘Uncle,’ which I am co-producing with Sajai Sebastian, was meant to be a low-budget film and we had almost cast another actor in the titular role. But, during the shoot of ‘Puthan Panam,’ I narrated the film’s plot to Mammootty, who liked it and wanted to do the movie.
For many years, I read mystery novels for relaxation. But my tastes were too narrow – and, having read all of Agatha Christie and John Dickson Carr, I discovered that the implausibility and the thinness of the people distracted me unduly from the plot.
A lot of cop shows, because they have the restraints of having a new case every episode, the victims often become these kind of nameless, faceless plot points, and as an audience we don’t feel anything for those people.
I start writing with only the vaguest idea about who my characters are and what is going to happen, and the characters and plot come into existence as I go. I’ve tried doing it the other way, but for me, outlining is a waste of time because I never follow the outline.
I find inspiration in many places. Sometimes music gives me the kernel of a story. Sometimes it’s dissatisfaction with the plot of a movie or a book that gets me thinking. Sometimes it’s love of a movie or book.
I lose tons of stuff on the cutting room floor. For Scary Movie 3, for example, we had a lot of Matrix spoofs, a Hulk scene, and some of that stuff just doesn’t hold up – it’s too much plot, audiences just didn’t want to hear about it.
One wise decision I made was buying a plot of land with planning permission in Richmond, and building my own five-bedroom home on it. I sold three years after I completed the building and more than doubled my money. I like Richmond and always have my eyes open for other properties in the area.
As a matter of writing philosophy, if there is one, I try not to ever plot a story. I try to write it from the character’s point of view and see where it goes.
When I’m plotting out a book, I use a storyboard – I’ll have maybe three lines across on the storyboard and just start working through the plot line. I always know where relationships will go and how the book is going to end.
When I think about directing a film, the thing that stops me short is wondering if I’m a natural at it the way I think you, and PTA, and Fincher are born directors. Maybe some people’s talent is in understanding the ways that film communicates, without dialogue, without plot.
No matter how many plots we uncover and disrupt, no matter how many terrorist organizations we degrade or destroy, another individual or group will rise to take their place.
You can’t mess around with young readers – you have to cut straight to the heart of the story. The character can be complex, the plot can have some surprises, but the emotions have to be clear.
Crime fiction makes money. It may be harder for writers to get published, but crime is doing better than most of what we like to call CanLit. It’s elementary, plot-driven, character-rich story-telling at its best.
I think people try to jam a lot of artificial plot devices into a lot of romantic comedies, and they don’t treat it with the respect I believe it deserves.
When I hit a block, regardless of what I am writing, what the subject matter is, or what’s going on in the plot, I go back and I read Pablo Neruda’s poetry. I don’t actually speak Spanish, so I read it translation. But I always go back to Neruda. I don’t know why, but it calms me, calms my brain.
I read a lot of literary theory when I was in graduate school, especially about novels, and the best book I ever read about endings was Peter Brooks’ ‘Reading for the Plot. ‘
It takes a fierce devotion to defend your artistic space, and eternal vigilance over it, because the needs of others will grow like vines in your little plot and claim it back for the jungle.
My outlines can be 10-20 pages in length and focus primarily on the physical active plot over the emotional plot.
The plot is not very important to me, though a novel must have one, of course. It’s just a line to hang the washing on.
Every story would be another story, and unrecognizable if it took up its characters and plot and happened somewhere else … Fiction depends for its life on place. Place is the crossroads of circumstance, the proving ground of, What happened? Who’s here? Who’s coming?
A film with an untidy plot cannot grip the audience and define their emotional response.
Mockumentary formats are great for a couple of things. One of them is delivering the toughest part of any sitcom episode, what writers call “pipe” – the nuts and bolts of the story where you explain what’s happening, the boring plot stuff.
When you get right down to it, there’s something uniquely satisfying in being gripped by a great plot, in begrudging whatever real-world obligations might prevent you from finding out what happens next.
Sometimes television can just jump from one bit of plot to the next, and the words fill in the in-between.
Character is plot, plot is character.
I find that I am much slower in the beginning of a book. I am thinking of the plot, of the characters and who they are, and where they are going. I often throw out a lot of the writing I start with, because the characters and plot improve as I write. Or perhaps I should say it is my hope they will improve as I write.
Sometimes you can have a great scene but it just doesn’t need to be in the movie. If it’s not progressing the plot, not progressing the story, not adding to the momentum, or if it’s not purposefully serving a breath – it has got to go.
First comes an idea. Then, characters begin to evolve out of the landscape of that idea. And then, finally, characters dominate: plot is simply a function of what these people might do or be. Everything has to flow from their personalities; otherwise it will not be emotionally engaging, or plausible.
Plot and melodrama were in every life; in some so briefly as hardly to be recognized, in others-in that of certain men and women in the public eye, for instance-they were almost in the nature of a continuous performance.
I get a very vague idea and – perhaps because I once was a journalist, or perhaps because that’s what made me want to be a journalist – I go off and explore it for a bit, rather than mapping out a plot and then filling in the research.
Anything that happens on any show is a plot contrivance because that’s just storytelling.
When you get to set, you don’t try to play the plot; you just play the character.
If you need to take a step back from day-to-day operations and plot out the long-term direction of your user experience strategy, consultants can give you a perspective you can’t get on your own.
I’m obviously very keen on the theater and I think it’s inevitable that some of the orchestral and chamber pieces have got dramatic elements which might even suggest an unspecified dramatic plot of some kind or other, even though it’s not in my mind at the time.
Remember, remember, the Fifth of November, the Gunpowder Treason and Plot. I know of no reason why the Gunpowder Treason should ever be forgot… But what of the man? I know his name was Guy Fawkes and I know, in 1605, he attempted to blow up the Houses of Parliament.
The plots of God are perfect. The Universe is a plot of God.
The great thing about a parallel-dimensions story is that you can literally never run out of plot.
I work on one book at a time. And yes, I am immersed. Six days a week for four to six hours a day. In between books, I stop writing for as much as two to three months, but during that time, I do research and think, plot and plan the book.
I’m always writing about character first. Plot, such as it is, comes from the characters.
Plot and scene are still the hardest things for me, though I think they’re the building blocks of what makes a story work.
Every so often you want to map out your plot mythology but never so specifically that you can’t let a story surprise you. You want to allow the type of action of the writer’s room so that you have the ability to take a left turn.
‘White Teeth’ has far too many characters, and its plot is tortured. But Smith has an astonishing intellect. She writes sharp dialogue for every age and race – and she’s funny as hell.
I love good stories; you have to have a good plot – characters which intertwine with a good plot.
In 2013, when it turned out that the plot of LaBeouf’s short film ‘HowardCantour.com’ (2012) had been purloined from graphic novelist Daniel Clowes’s 2007 comic ‘Justin M. Damiano’, the actor-director responded with a series of tweet apologies that also appeared to be shoplifted.
‘Rozabal’ was theological while ‘Chanakya’ is political. Unlike ‘Rozabal,’ which was about research, the aim of ‘Chanakya’ is plot, plot, plot, which carries the character. The common DNA, of course, is history.
To devote yourself to the creation and enjoyment of beauty, then, can be a serious business-not always necessarily a means of escaping reality, but sometimes a means of holding on to the real when everything is flaking away into… rhetoric and plot.
I plot my ascent daily.
There’s not a woman in the book, the plot hinges on unkindness to animals, and the black characters mostly drown by Chapter 29.
Language description and metaphors seem readily available. The things I have to work harder at are plot, pacing, and form.
The same way that some people can play the piano, I can do plots! They just come!
The real story is not the plot, but how the characters unfold by it.
I plot the first 5 or 6 chapters quite minutely, and also the end. So I know where I am going but not how I’m going to get there, which gives characters the chance to develop organically, as happens in real life as you get to know a person.
I want the situations and plots to be surprising and unusual.
But nearly every woman I know has a roughly similar story – in fact, dozens of them: stories about being obsessed with a celebrity, work colleague or someone they vaguely knew for years; living in a parallel world in their head; conjuring up endless plots and scenarios for this thing that never actually happened.
When I am thickening my plots, I like to think ‘What if … What if … ‘ Thus my imagination can move from the likely, which everyone can think of, to the unlikely-but-possible, my preferred plot.
Mysteries and thrillers are not the same things, though they are literary siblings. Roughly put, I would say the distinction is that mysteries emphasize motive and psychology whereas thrillers rely more heavily on action and plot.
Rocking on a lazy billow
With roaming eyes,
Cushioned on a dreamy pillow,
Thou art now wise.
Wake the power within thee slumbering,
Trim the plot that’s in thy keeping,
Thou wilt bless the task when reaping
Sweet labour’s prize.
With roaming eyes,
Cushioned on a dreamy pillow,
Thou art now wise.
Wake the power within thee slumbering,
Trim the plot that’s in thy keeping,
Thou wilt bless the task when reaping
Sweet labour’s prize.
In 2008, while the film version of my book ‘Choke’ was coming to market, my mother was diagnosed with lung cancer. That meant that I had to appear in public to promote a comedy about a son trying to save his dying mother – the plot of Choke – while privately I was caring for my own dying mother. It was torture.
As a writer, I try to appeal to the ‘elusive boy audience’ the same way I try to appeal to everyone: I do the very best I can to create interesting characters, addictive plots, tons of conflict, believable settings, unexpected plot twists, intriguing beginnings, and satisfying endings.
Badlapur’ is a drama, a character-driven story. It is not so much about plot.
The past record of man is burdened with accounts of assasinations, secret combines, palace plots and betrayals in war. But in spite of this clear record, an amazing number of people have begun to scoff at the possibility of conspiracy at work today. They dismiss such an idea merely a conspiratorial point of view.
I love writing both fiction and memoir. Both have unique challenges; bottom line, fiction is hard because you have to come up with the credible, twisty plot, and memoir is hard because you have to say something true and profound, albeit in a funny way.
Jill Eisenstadt’s comic second novel, ‘Kiss Out,’ is a work of such extravagant wackiness, eccentricity, and exuberance that any attempt to squeeze it into the confines of a simple plot summary seems doomed to failure and is possibly pointless.
Try this experiment: Pick a famous movie – ‘Casablanca,’ say – and summarize the plot in one sentence. Is that plot you just described the thing you remember most about it? Doubtful. Narrative is a necessary cement, but it disappears from memory.
I don’t have a name and I don’t have a plot. I have the typewriter and I have white paper and I have me, and that should add up to a novel.
I think people got in touch with me either knowing my work, or probably more frequently just knowing a plot or sort of buzz about something I did and sort of saying, “Get that guy that writes the crazy stuff in here.”
When you get ready to write your novel, outline it first. There’s nothing worse than getting halfway through and realizing you’ve painted yourself in a plot corner.
I’m really quite bad at coming up with plot ideas. I like to create characters and just see what will happen to them when I let them loose!
In my books, women often solve the problem. Even if the woman is not the hero, she’s a strong character. She does change the plot. She’ll often rescue the male character from some situation.
Storylines are how characters create the plots involved in their stories.
In discussing the process with the actors, I made it clear to them that they could improvise but that the sum total of their improvisation needed to impart certain plot points, and schematic material.
These days, I like to think of sentences as workers. Only one of their jobs is to look and sound good. Sentences are the carriers of plot. They’re the conjurers of images, the conveyors of tone and meaning and voice. The best sentences surprise us.
Members walk into the chamber full of hatred. They believe the worst lies about the other side. Two senators stopped by my office just a few hours ago. Why? They had a plot to nail somebody on the other side. That’s what Congress has come to.
Life has no plot, why must films or fiction?
The story line of my novel [The Kite Runner] is largely fictional. The characters were invented and the plot imagined.
I’m not really good at character or plot development. I’m just interested in big comedic moments.
I think a lot of composers get into trouble just making up a plot and expecting an audience to follow that.
The audience today has heard every joke. They know every plot. They know where you’re going before you even start. That’s a tough audience to surprise, and a tough audience to write for. It’s much more competitive now, because the audience is so much more – I want to say sophisticated.
All plots tend to move deathward. This is the nature of plots.
When I watch a movie I don’t really care too much about the plot – not that it isn’t important, but what I remember is the visual imagery, something that happens in an individual scene.
U.S. Rep. Debbie Wasserman-Schultz accused Republicans of trying to make it a crime to be an illegal alien. Democrats see a conspiracy plot. First Republicans want to say that illegal aliens are illegal, next they’re going to want to take away their voting rights.
The character can never be static from book to book. People might think you just come up with a new plot and stick this guy in. Well, he has to be as new as the plot every time.
When you’re reading a novel, I think the reason you care about how any given plot turns out is that you take it as a data point in the big story of how the world works. Does such-and-such a kind of guy get the girl in the end? Does adultery ever bring happiness? How do winners become winners?
In the ‘Buffy’ room, it was never about a plot twist, ever. It was always about, ‘Tell the story, tell the characters, complicate their lives, make things get worse,’ but we never worked backwards from the plot, and it was always a great lesson.
I like to allow a story to arise as I’m writing scripts. I find it horrible when I try to think of something for the plot without really being on the ground and seeing where it goes.
In terms of the breadth of the threat of Al Qaeda itself – it’s not the only terrorist organization, and it works with others as cells around the world in at least 60 countries. You potentially are talking about tens of thousands of followers who can be conscripted into service to carry out a terrorist plot.
While I was writing ‘Elizabeth Is Missing’ and struggling with the intricacies of the plot, I told myself the next book would be really simple and linear, and I’d have it all worked out before I set down a single word.
As long as I like the script, speak the language and feel interested in the plot, I can play any role.
The first black president was a hotter plot line than the first woman president.
O poor New England! There is a deep laid plot against your civil and religious liberties, and they will be lost. Your golden days are at an end. You have nothing but trouble before you. . . . Your liberties will be lost.
The time has mainly gone on getting Inform into a decent shape for public use. I suppose the plot of ‘Curses’ makes a sequel conceivable when compared with, say, the plot of ‘Hamlet’ but none is planned.
I’d like to work with some of the videogame companies for the simple fact that they obviously need some sort of writer’s help. I play videogames, and lately it’s hard for me to enjoy them because I’m spending all my time cringing at the corny dialogue, thin characters, and glaring plot holes.
War isn’t a TV show with plot twists to keep the viewers interested. The proliferation of images and blanket media coverage have suffocated the life out of old-style photojournalism.
I once had an editor advise me, as I was revising one of my early novels, to add more characters. I played around with the idea. As soon as I’d decided a few fresh faces and give them something to do, I realized that what my editor had really asked for was more plot. Ding. More characters equals more action.
I think it’s a question which particularly arises over women writers: whether it’s better to have a happy life or a good supply of tragic plots.
Plots are for dead people.
The main plot line is simple: Getting your character to the foot of the tree, getting him up the tree, and then figuring out how to get him down again.
I thought why not write a kind of mystery, murder, thriller book, but use romance language where the language plays completely against the very dark subject matter, that very strange murderous plot, but use that Harlequin Romance language.
Two things I do well in books are sex and violence, but I don’t want gratuitous sex or violence. The sex and violence are only as graphic as need be. And never included unless it furthers the plot or character development.
Sometimes I worry that I’ve lost the plot My twitching muscles tease my flippant thoughts I never really dreamed of heaven much Until we put him in the ground. There is nothing as lucky, as easy, or free
It’s very liberating for me to realize that I don’t have to step up to the plate with a plot that involves the U.N. Security Council.
Obviously, a theatrical masterpiece needs more than a plot; many television shows are nothing but plot, and it is doubtful that they will stand the test of time. But I also don’t think that making fun of plot or acting like we’re all somehow ‘above’ structure is such a good idea.
I don’t want to write about violence, and I don’t want to hang a plot on a murder. I think it’s cheap.
This element of surprise or mystery the detective element as it is sometimes rather emptily called is of great importance in a plot.
The plot! The plot! What kind of plot could a poet possibly provide that is not surpassed by the thinking, feeling reader? Form alone is divine.
Through all the drama – whether damned or not – Love gilds the scene, and women guide the plot.
Traditionally in crime fiction, women exist as a bedroom convenience or to screw up in order that the plot may progress. I wanted no part of that.
I consider plot a necessary intrusion on what I really want to do, which is write snappy dialogue.
Every reality show plot pales in comparison to our history.
The story of ‘A Dog’s Purpose’ flowed into me a set piece. The entire book was just there, as if I were connected to a streaming service, a novel wholly formed of character and plot. This has never happened to me before or since. I prayed for help and I got it. A gift.
I’ve always loved movies dealing with the terror of a woman who doesn’t really know her husband and finds out that he’s a monster. It’s one of my favorite plots.
I think the further away you get from completing a book, the more responses you see to it from readers, the more your own tastes and opinions shift and the more you start to see things you could have written differently in the detail, or done differently on the broader scale of plot and character.
Plots are … what the writer sees with.
The real world is devoid of narratives, after all. Narratives are just a thing that our brains do with facts in order to draw a line around the incomprehensible largeness of reality and wrestle it into something learnable and manipulable. Existence is devoid of plot, theme, and most of all moral.
Sometimes, like in ‘Invisible Monsters,’ I get too out of control, and instead of a plot point every chapter, I want a plot point in every sentence.
Welcome to the real world, she said to me.
Condescendingly.
Take a seat.
Take your life.
Plot it out in black and white.
Condescendingly.
Take a seat.
Take your life.
Plot it out in black and white.
I tell stories through dance, and I think that’s why I’m so attracted to the theatre because even the choreography in theatre moves the plot forward at all times.
There is no vengeance as terrible as the vengeance a coward plots in the dark of his heart.
I calculated the total time that humans have waited for web pages to load. It cancels out all the productivity gains of the information age. Sometimes I think the web is a big plot to keep people like me away from normal society.
As a creator of character his peculiarity is that he creates wherever his eyes rest … With such a power at his command Dickens made his books blaze up, not by tightening the plot or sharpening the wit, but by throwing another handful of people upon the fire.
That’s the way life is: meaning is always there, but there is no clearly given way of decoding it. Conventional cinema obscures this with an easy reduction of meaning to plot and schematic characters.
My feeling for reality TV isn’t ironic, guilty, or apologetic. Reality TV is one of the few remaining modes of popular entertainment in which characterization is permitted as plot.
My writing has always been what you call ‘narrative fiction’ in the sense that it’s got very strong plots and twists at the end.
Sometimes I wish that just solving the plot problems was enough. And then elves would go and do all the actual work moving the words around.
I’m a pantser. I try to plot. I always try to plot. I end up with a few paragraphs that basically outline the gist of the story.But I never get much beyond that. I get too impatient to write.
Hospitals are often grim places: being stuck on a ward is excruciatingly boring, especially when you’re too ill to follow the plot of a book, and struggling to sleep through the guttural cries of people writhing in agony in adjacent beds.
The plot of my ‘Phantom’ is pretty much mine. It’s based on the Gaston Leroux book – I’ve taken a lot of liberties with it.
Don’t sit down in the middle of the woods. If you’re lost in the plot or blocked, retrace your steps to where you went wrong. Then take the other road. And/or change the person. Change the tense. Change the opening page.
The plot is so tired that even this reviewer, who in infancy was let drop by a nurse with the result that she has ever since been mystified by amateur coin tricks, was able to guess the identity of the murderer from the middle of the book.
Keith Richards outlived Jim Fixx, the runner and health-nut dude. The plot thickens.
There are those who maintain that in this world women have no right to interfere in the affairs of state, in politics, in plots and counter-plots. Others that are who, more chivalrous, are willing to admit that women have as much right to act, think, and speak as men.
The era of television in which I grew up was much simpler than now. Its conventions were quite transparent and fun to think about. Who could ever remember the plot of those shows?
Life is replete with comedy, drama, horror, suspense, tragedy, romance, mystery, fantasy and a good dose of fiction. While at times the plot may seem to be lacking, the special effects alone are well worth the price of admission.
I feel a lot of adult fiction looks down on plot as a lesser form of literature.
Write a story a great writer would write. Because part of becoming an artist is pushing through all the disbelief of those around you, deciding that you are a writer when you have no idea what a plot is or whether what you’ve written is any good, or anything.
I like to believe my suspense novels marry the strong characters from my romance writing past, with the twisty, clever plots of my mystery writing present.
I wanted to make a cinema of ideas, not plots, and to use the same aesthetics as painting, which has always paid great attention to formal devices of structure, composition and framing.
Some movies I see today have the most dramatic plot points but the actors are not playing them dramatically.
The biggest lesson learned from ‘X-Men: The Last Stand’ or ‘X3’ was that if you are going to tell a Phoenix story, tell the Phoenix story. Don’t make it the subplot of the movie. Make it the plot of the movie.
Once you engage with the simple enough business of feeding yourself, of soil and water, weather, season and harvest, it becomes personal. It is about you, your family and friends. Food becomes an aspect of those relationships as well as your intimacy with your plot.
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.
You can wipe your feet on me, twist my motives around all you like, you can dump millstones on my head and drown me in the river, but you can’t get me out of the story. I’m the plot, babe, and don’t ever forget it.
I lost the plot for a while then. And I lost the subplot, the script, the soundtrack, the intermission, my popcorn, the credits, and the exit sign.
Remember, remember the fifth of November of gunpowder treason and plot. I know of no reason why the gun powder treason should ever be forgot.
The story is not in the plot but in the telling.
Characters make their own plot. The dimensions of the characters determine the action of the novel.
The so-called commercialism includes elements like story, plots, rhythms and large big scenes.
I feel like I know how to write plot.
I did a show called ‘Lois & Clark’ – it was about Superman – years ago. They wanted someone to play the president of the United States. The plot was the president got kidnapped by a group, and they made a clone of him, who was very irresponsible and silly.
If you read a book that’s fiction and you get caught in the characters and the plot, and swept away, really, by the fiction of it – by the non-reality – you sometimes wind up changing your reality as well. Often, when the last page is turned, it will haunt you.
I begin by writing paragraphs that don’t have an immediate relation to a plot. The sound of the story comes first.
But keep characters in propinquity long enough and a story will always develop a plot.
It was a challenge for me to do a plot because I’d been an essayist and a journalist. I had to be vigilant about moving things along and being entertaining.
Imgur is a data-driven company, and our community is our most important signal. But you can’t perfectly plot humans neatly into a chart. It takes someone with instincts and empathy to truly understand the community and represent them in all of the company decisions.
Do we really have to wander around apologizing for enjoying plot, just because James Wood and a few dozen other arch-aesthetes sniff at it? It’s like being careful not to sing pop songs in the shower because some guy in the local alt-weekly is a music snob.
Those who plot the destruction of others often perish in the attempt.
I like fast plots with things that explode.
Life has no plot. It is by far more interesting than anything you can say about it.
In Endless Quest books, you start the plot, and the character has to make choices. Then you have to write one choice over here, one choice over there. The author might get one or two choices out.
The main thing that I learned from editing is that most people, when they’re making a film, they start too early into the story. They will try to set up the characters, they will try to establish things before the plot actually starts.
I’m not like Jonathan Hickman, who’s able to sort of plot out three years of a book ahead of time. I’m much more of a guy who plots out an arc or two at a time.
A potato can grow quite easily on a very small plot of land. With molecular manufacturing, we’ll be able to have distributed manufacturing, which will permit manufacturing at the site using technologies that are low-cost and easily available.
As a former career intelligence professional, I have a profound appreciation for the value of intelligence. Intelligence disrupts terrorist plots and thwarts attacks. Intelligence saves lives.
The Glittering World is a stunning phantasmagoria drawn from the world just beneath the surface, aswarm with great and memorable characters and a plot that twists and turns as it hurtles forward. A grand debut. One taste, and you’ll be addicted.
When we mean to build, We first survey the plot, then draw the model; And when we see the figure of the house, Then must we rate the cost of the erection.
Here’s what I think is good about ‘Ted Lasso’ and what I’m proud of in it, as a writer: It’s about kindness and teamwork and empathy, and being curious and not judgmental, but it does all of that through storytelling and plot.
though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till.
The challenge that I set for myself was to see whether or not plot and structure could coexist, and why it was that we had to always privilege one above the other.
I think too often in films, people think endings are a summation of plot, and I don’t like that. Because once you know where you’re going as an audience member, then it’s like a video game. You’re just waiting for them to get through the levels and beat the bad guy. And I just think that’s boring.
I am writing to a rhythm and not to a plot.
As a matter of writing philosophy, if there is one, I try not to ever plot a story. I try to write it from the character’s point of view and see where it goes.
Mohammed al-Qahtani was not alleged to be a leader of the Sept. 11 plot. He was not trained as a pilot. If he was involved, he was one of the ‘muscle’ hijackers.
I have a catch-phrase to describe my plot-generation technique — ‘What’s the worst possible thing I can do to these people?’
I hate the word juicy in describing anything: lips, plots, oranges. But especially novels. It feels – icky. Reminds me of saliva.
I always feel funny when I don’t reveal things, especially to you [the press], who have supported us so much and are really the big reason we’re here. But, we hold back information about the plot because we want to reward the fans for sticking with us, and that’s so much fun. That’s the funnest part of it.
There’s almost always a point in a book where something happens that triggers the rest of the plot.
The writer asks himself, ‘Can I think of a plot that will parallel this? Can I take this work of literature as an example of something I might produce?’ Let us, then, consider literature as a productive science.
The best calculation is the absence of calculation. Once you have attained a certain level of recognition, others generally figure that when you do something, it’s for an intelligent reason. So it’s really foolish to plot out your movements too carefully in advance. You’re better off acting capriciously.
The general plot of life is sometimes shaped by the different ways genuine intelligence combines with equally genuine ignorance.
Time and times are but cogwheels, unmatched, grinding on oblivious to one another. Occasionally – oh, very rarely! – the cogs fit; the pieces of the plot snap together momentarily and give men faint glimpses beyond the veil of this everyday blindness we call reality.
But people will do anything rather than admit that their lives have no meaning. No use, that is. No plot.
Growing up, for years and years I had no idea what the plots of operas were, and that’s part of what fascinated me – I could make them up and learn bits and pieces of what was going on over time. There’s something about it being always a step away that makes it more fun to chase.
I’m not one of those politicians, to my probably discredit, who thinks very far ahead. It has to feel right to me and not be about a careful plot and plan.
I need time to develop the idea into a plot before I talk about it.
The Clinton machine is at the center of this power structure. We’ve seen this first hand in the WikiLeaks documents, in which Hillary Clinton meets in secret with international banks to plot the destruction of U.S. sovereignty in order to enrich these global financial powers, her special interest friends and her donors.
40 Words for Sorrow is brilliant-one of the finest crime novels I’ve ever read. Giles Blunt writes with uncommon grace, style and compassion and he plots like a demon. This book has it all-unforgettable characters, beautiful language, throat-constricting suspense.
So the books for the Englishman, as he listened intently or not, had gaps of plot like sections of a road washed out by storms, missing incidents as if locusts had consumed a section of tapestry, as if plaster loosened by the bombing had fallen away from a mural at night.
Plot and character are virtually the same thing.
I don’t think I’m a natural novelist. Plot is definitely one of my weaker points. I’ve been working on it a long time, and it’s not getting much better.
I don’t really care about plot; I want to have a page-turner in a different kind of way.
Our enemy is motivated by hatred and will not stop planning more plots against until they are ultimately defeated. Today was an important and necessary victory in the war, but there is a long road ahead. We must remain committed if we are to succeed and protect our liberty.
I confess that I cannot understand how we can plot, lie, cheat and commit murder abroad and remain humane, honorable, trustworthy and trusted at home.
I believe that the writer should tell a story. I believe in plot. I believe in creating characters and suspense.
I had a plot connection that nobody understood for this fourth character, and decided, Oh, nobody gets it, that’s all. I’ll write another draft to make her make sense. It took me awhile to learn that these three people were the core of this play, which seems so obvious now.
I write poems about relationships, love relationships, and I’m not able to do that all the time. I could go two years without writing poems, and then write a dozen. Having a novel to work on, with the intricate puzzle of character and plot to work out, is satisfying for the time there is no poetry.
There is not one big cosmic meaning for all, there is only the meaning we each give to our life, an individual meaning, an individual plot, like an individual novel, a book for each person.
‘Where’d You Go, Bernadette’ is an epistolary novel – one told in letters. I had no idea how much fun it would be, puzzling together the plot with letters and documents.
Maybe it’s true that we are all descended from the restless, the nervous, the criminals, the arguers and brawlers, but also the brave and independent and generous. If our ancestors had not been that, they would have stayed in their home plots in the other world and starved over the squeezed-out soil.
PLOT is CHARACTER revealed by ACTION.
It really helps if you know your subject matter immediately. I find that enormously useful because then you can concentrate on all the usual novelistic things – the character, the plot and so forth – and you don’t have to spend an enormous amount of time learning another trade, essentially.
As a reader I like both great characterization and fast moving plots. The challenge is to balance the both and not compromise one for the other.
When I work on a movie, I look at the script or watch the film, and I talk to my director or producers and make a plan: this is our main character; we need a theme for this plot. We need a love theme.
Once the world has been created, the fantasy author still has to bring the story’s characters to life and unfold a gripping plot. That’s why good fantasy is such a hard act to bring off.
Biographies are, in their nature, far more difficult to make into films than novels, because novels come with plots constructed and dialogue written, whereas I don’t invent dialogue for my subjects or plot their lives for them.
The absence of plot leaves the reader room to think about other things.
I do think of ‘The Idiot,’ in a way, as a self-standing book about a certain struggle to make meaning, the struggle for a girl to find meaning outside of the romance plot.
With fiction, you can talk about plot, character and narrative, whereas a poem brings home the fact that everything that happens in a work of literature happens in terms of language. And this is daunting stuff to deal with.
You can’t remember the plot of the Dr Who movie because it didn’t have one, just a lot of plot holes strung together. It did have a lot of flashing lights, though.
I have a book coming out in September, for example, where the plot concerns counterfeiting, and I had to do a lot of research on that. Or on any legal matters, for example, I have to do a lot of research online.
I have a book coming out in September, for example, where the plot concerns counterfeiting, and I had to do a lot of research on that. Or on any legal matters, for example, I have to do a lot of research online.
My major contribution to the format was to suggest that I be able to step out of the plot and speak directly to the audience, and then be able to go right back into the action. That was an original idea of mine; I know it was because I originally stole it from Thornton Wilder’s play Our Town.
When you reach the editing stage, it is often the case that you can get too involved with the story to detect errors. You can see words in your head that aren’t actually there on the page, sentences blur together and errors escape you, and you follow plot threads and see only the images in your skull.
I am greedy for both Hollywood and Bollywood. For me, Bollywood is not new, as it is something that I grow up on… I know the plot… stories and characters that are written and made. I haven’t got the right opportunity to show my work in Bollywood.
Plot springs from character… I’ve always sort of believed that these people inside me- these characters- know who they are and what they’re about and what happens, and they need me to help get it down on paper because they don’t type.
Typically, I have a fairly good grip on the plot of a suspense novel before I set about writing it. I must know beforehand how the mystery ultimately will be solved.
When we submit our lives to what we read in scripture, we find that we are not being led to see God in our stories but our stories in God’s. God is the larger context and plot in which our stories find themselves.
We inherit plots. There are only two or three in the world, five or six at most. We ride them like treadmills.
Disturbing and intriguing. The Synchronicity Factor is much more than a page-turning thriller, for its remarkable plot is rooted in real science and real history.
I shy away from plot structure that depends on the characters behaving in ways that are going to eventually be explained by their childhood, or by some recent trauma or event. People are incredibly complicated. Who knows why they are the way they are?
The opposing missions of the various characters create the plot.
Stripped of its plot, the ‘Iliad’ is a scattering of names and biographies of ordinary soldiers: men who trip over their shields, lose their courage or miss their wives. In addition to these, there is a cast of anonymous people: the farmers, walkers, mothers, neighbours who inhabit its similes.
Alafair Burke understands the criminal mind. Long Gone is both an education and an entertainment of the first order. This is a very clever and very smart novel by a very clever and smart writer. The dialogue crackles, the plot is intriguing, and the pacing is perfect.
Compelling characters are not cogs in the machine of your plot; they are human beings to whom the story happens.
The guilty is he who meditates a crime; the punishment is his who lays the plot.
Not only around our infancy Doth heaven with all its splendors lie; Daily, with souls that cringe and plot, We Sinais climb and know it not.
What I ate for breakfast on school mornings was one buttered roll–a soft roll, not a hard roll–and one cup of cocoa; any attempt to alter this menu I regarded as a plot to poison me.
Essentially and most simply put, plot is what the characters do to deal with the situation they are in. It is a logical sequence of events that grow from an initial incident that alters the status quo of the characters.
Social media give me the privilege of learning about more people than I could meet in my whole life. Taken together, the Internet reads like the grandest character-driven novel humanity has ever known. Not much plot, though.
I did … learn an important distinction in graduate school: a speculation about who had syphilis when is gossip if it’s about your friends, a plot element if it’s about a character in a novel, and scholarship if it’s about John Keats.
All good plots come from well-orchestrated characters pitted against one another in a conflict of wills.
When a critic or journalist writes, ‘It’s too complex,’ or, ‘It’s full of plot holes,’ they very rarely take the step of identifying what they mean. The reason they do that is to protect themselves, because they don’t want to reveal that they may have misunderstood or missed something.
There must be a better reason to have a baby than to provide a plot point in a rom-com. Don’t you think?
The biographical novel sets out to document this truth, for character is plot, character development is action, and character fulfillment is resolution.
Each of us needs an adequate biography: How do I put together into a coherent image the pieces of my life? How do I find the basic plot of my story?
Character is primary. What happens as far as plot and events is not as intriguing to me as what’s happening inside this particular person.
Baseball is part of America’s plot, part of America’s mysterious, underlying design-the plot in which we all conspire and collude, the plot of the story of our national life.
Plot, or evolution, is life responding to environment; and not only is this response always in terms of conflict, but the really great struggle, the epic struggle of creation, is the inner fight of the individual whereby the soul builds up character.
Plot is just not my gift. I’m fascinated with complex characters, and that doesn’t mix well with complex plots. And by the way, when the plot is simple, you can move one piece around and make it feel fresh. Hell or High Water’s a good example: I don’t tell you why the brothers are robbing the bank.
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.
I think that the government has an obligation to monitor communications that could reveal a plot to murder millions of Americans. Monitoring bowel movements? I’ll leave that to some of the gay bloggers, that’s much more their style.
There is one plot point in one of the ‘D’Arnath’ books that I don’t think I handled as well as I could have. Am I going to tell you which one? No way!
I elect to stay on the soil of which I was born and on the plot of ground which I have fairly bought and honestly paid for. Don’t advise me to leave, and don’t add insult to injury by telling me it’s for my own good; of that I am to be the judge.
In commercial fiction especially, everything in the story usually contributes directly to the plot The shorter the story, the truer this is
History meets romance meets suspense! Compelling, original and wildly romantic, Beatriz Williams’ prose is stunning and the plot edge-of-your-seat gripping. OVERSEAS is an absolute triumph—I loved every page.
I could make up characters till the cows came home. Plot’s what hard. Very hard.
I have suggested that behind almost all myth lies the mono-plot of the game of hide-and-seek.
Northern Sweden holds a special kind of magic. It’s cold, lonely, and the people are tough and silent, or so the stereotype says. This is Asa Larsson’s home turf and I find as much joy in reading her closely observed descriptions of the environment, as in following her intriguing plots.
We live in our tales of ourselves, she thought, and ignore as best we can the contradictions, and the lapses, and the abrasions of plot against our mortal souls.
I don’t like plots. I don’t know what a plot means. I can’t stand the idea of anything that starts in the beginning – you know, ‘beginning, middle and end.’
The fiction writer has a lot of balls to juggle. Setting, pacing, dialogue, and so on. And let’s not forget: plot. That was always a hard one for me. And I always had this spastic tendency to wrap up a story before I’d seen it the whole way through, a sort of writer’s pre-ejaculatory tendency: “The End!”
A story to me means a plot where there is some surprise… Because this is how life is full of surprises.
I started as a playwright. Any sort of scriptwriting you do helps you hone your story. You have the same demands of creating a plot, developing relatable characters and keeping your audience invested in your story. My books are basically structured like three-act plays.
Ugh! How many stories about love, copulation, marriage and death already exist, not one of which tells the truth! How sick I am of well-constructed plots and brilliant writing!
If you string together a set of speeches expressive of character, and well finished in point and diction and thought, you will not produce the essential tragic effect nearly so well as with a play which, however deficient in these respects, yet has a plot and artistically constructed incidents.
I know from the past, critics often say my films don’t have any plot, that kind of thing. I’m used to being told, “Yeah, it’s slow and has no plot.”
I feel like having details from their day and having a plot and action and things to do is much more revealing than having a character sitting and thinking to themselves. When I’m writing, I want people to actually have a goal, something that’s dragging them forward.
You can only see ‘Star Wars’ for the first time once, and people are watching it again and again and again, and it’s a testament to the strength beyond the plot twists that it has. The narrative strength that it has is that it can be enjoyed even though you know the biggest plot elements in it.
I didn’t want to do comedy again. It is way harder when you are doing comedy. You can’t just concentrate on the character and the plot. In comedy, the writers, instead of obsessing about character and plot, obsess about the jokes.
Plot is just a fancy way of saying ‘and then.
The plot of ‘Stranger Things’ is so simple that even a brief description risks spoiling it.
You learn to do your best writing on story rather than off story. Very often at the beginning of their careers, writers including me do their best dialogue writing off story – the best lines, the best observations – but they haven’t got enough to do with the plot to stay in.
Like a lot of writers, I just got sick to death of conventional fiction. I absolutely couldn’t stand the illusion of reality and plot. I just couldn’t stomach it.
Character, story and plot are affected by any action sequence so you have to really design them accordingly.
The Blood She Betrayed is unique, and Shahkara, the character, is one of the most engaging strong female role models I’ve seen in a long time. This girl can handle herself! The plot is full of ingenious twists, turns and surprises, and I look forward to reading the next book in the series.
I think I’m good at metaphors and descriptions. Plot doesn’t come naturally to me, so I work really hard at it.
Music, I find, gets you out of a trap [when screenwriting], because it speaks to your emotions directly, it’s an abstract thing, it’s not concerned with plot or story. And so music really helps – often I’ll listen to the music and just write anything, just to get through.
A story to me means a plot where there is some surprise. Because that is how life is – full of surprises.
We will never be a part of any plot against those who are governing our country.
My life has a superb cast, but I cannot figure out the plot.
For me, plot always comes out of character, so I had to be sure of my characters.
That idea of not always being in control of the primitive parts of yourself – the bits that fall in love or the bits that dance or lose the plot or drink too much – and putting that across… that’s pop for me. It’s playing with all the different colours of the rainbow of life.
I try to trace the connection between the characters and that way a story or plot emerges.
If somebody from the past doesn’t rise up from the grave and start talking to me, I haven’t got a book. I have to hear that voice, the voice of the narrator. How she sounds will tell me who she is, and who she is will tell me how she will act – and that starts the plot in motion.
Story and plot, not historical facts, are the engine of a novel, but I was committed to working through the grain of actual history and coming to something, an overall effect, which approximated truth.
But it isn’t a rough draft either. The one I turned in several months ago was rough. There were some bad plot holes, some logical inconsistencies, pacing problems, and not nearly enough lesbian unicorns.
[Reviewing the New York City Telephone Directory] But it is the opinion of the present reviewer that the weakness of plot is due to the great number of characters which clutter up the pages. The Russian school is responsible for this.
I do try to plot about a chapter ahead once I get going. I have a list of upcoming scenes with little notes about them. But sometimes the story changes and I don’t end up following that.
If you look at the attached plot you will see that the land also shows the 1940s blip (as I’m sure you know). So, if we could reduce the ocean blip by, say, 0.15 degC, then this would be significant for the global mean—but we’d still have to explain the land blip.
‘Harry Potter’ shouldn’t be children’s first experience with suspense and plot turns.
yet it seems
Life scarce can cast a fragrance on the wind,
Scarce spread a glory to the morning beams,
But the torn petals strew the garden plot;
And there’s but common greenness after that.
Life scarce can cast a fragrance on the wind,
Scarce spread a glory to the morning beams,
But the torn petals strew the garden plot;
And there’s but common greenness after that.
I’ve learned to look like I’m listening to long confusing plots of cartoons and comic books when I’m actually sound asleep or making grocery shopping lists in my head.
I tend not to know what the plot is or the story is or even the theme. Those things come later, for me.
I better make the plot good. I wanted to make it grip people on the first page and have a big turning point in the middle, as there is, and construct the whole thing like a roller coaster ride.
To me, it all comes down to things being character-driven. It’s hard for me to look beyond that. CG and all this cool stuff – so be it. But to me, it pretty much begins and ends with character-driven plots rather than technologically-driven plots.
Character, I think, is the single most important thing in fiction. You might read a book once for its interesting plot—but not twice.
In addition to the wishes of the client, the position, orientation, and size of the plot also play an important role in determining the final plan of the house. The ‘where’ and ‘how’ of the exterior then follows naturally from all of that.
When evil men plot, good men must plan. When evil men burn and bomb, good men must build and bind. When evil men shout ugly words of hatred, good men must commit themselves to the glories of love.
The writer I adore is Ivy Compton-Burnett.I couldn’t get more than a few pages in when I first read her. In many ways, she is very clumsy and her plots are rubbish. But we don’t read her for that. There are pages and pages of dialogue. What it requires is real effort and attention.
I get fed up with plots that are driven by someone constantly getting information on a computer.
When a number of crimes – for instance, burglaries – can be linked to the same offender, police often plot the locations on a map. The art of finding the location of the criminal’s home based on the crime sites is a key objective in what is known as geographical profiling.
What the devil does the plot signify, except to bring in fine things?
I think situations are more important than plot and character.
Plot a murder, you’re saying. But every plot is a murder in effect. To plot is to die, whether we know it or not.
A plot is like the bones of a person, not interesting like expression, or signs of experience, but the support of the whole.
What a Devil is the Plot good for, but to bring in fine things?
There was a time when my parents had to sell off a plot of land so that I can buy a rifle for competitive tournaments. After that we stayed in a rented house for the next 15 years.
Characters are story. And any great plot or subplot is driven
by the characters’ wants and desires.
by the characters’ wants and desires.
I really felt sometimes like I was physically pulling the plot, and it was heavy. I’m sure it didn’t look great that I was going into my dressing room at lunch.
With its vastly complicated plot and its immense cast of characters swirling around the case of Jarndyce vs. Jarndyce that has been grinding away in the Court of Chancery for decades, ‘Bleak House’ is, for many readers, Dickens’s greatest novel.
There are thirty-two ways to write a story, and I’ve used every one, but there is only one plot – things are not as they seem.
Most crime fiction plots are not ambitious enough for me. I want something really labyrinthine with clues and puzzles that will reward careful attention.
Before this ugly edifice, and between it and the wheel-track of the street, was a grass-plot, much overgrown with burdock, pig-weed, apple-pern, and such unsightly vegetation, which evidently found something congenial in the soil that had so early borne the black flower of civilized society, a prison.
That’s the problem with fiction — or the charm, if you want. Even mediocre plots have a way of sinking their hooks into you, until you find yourself concerned for the fates of characters who aren’t even fully convincing.
Writing for the theater is a whole different can of fish. The music now has the responsibility of so many things. The plot could be giving you different views of the character; the emotional highlights of a moment.
Believe it, my good friend, to love truth for truth’s sake is the principal part of human perfection in the world, and the seed-plot of all other virtues; and if I mistake not, you have as much of it as I ever met with in anybody.
Mirzapur’s female characters are very strong, liberated women. Infact, the boys are leaning on us and we are contributing to the plot in a very strong manner.
In 2013, I transferred my company Essential Hospitality that owned the plot to RKW Developers against full and final payment. No loans were taken in this company and it was completely debt-free when we sold the same to RKW.
But why should I cast myself in the ancient female part of victim of men’s plots and passions?
I mean, I’ve done college basketball, a horse race, a bunch of different things and they’d blow by but golf has a frenetic pace of bouncing around from shot to shot and green to green and, in essence, acre to acre over this huge plot of land with over 150 players who are their own team.
I can tell you that as a writer and as a reader, I regard character as king. Or queen. No matter how riveting the action or interesting the plot twists, if I don’t feel like I’m meeting someone who feels real, I’m not going to be compelled to read further.
Point of view is not something I consciously decide. Almost always, when I come up with a plot I find that the point of view has automatically arrived with it, part and parcel of the story.
From beginning to end Wilde performed his life and continued to do so even after fame had taken the plot out of his own hands.
I’m not a good crime writer. I’m not good with plots… so I have to do something else.
My forte is the plotting. You sit down, and you work out a plot.
An idea has no worth at all without believable characters to implement it; a plot without characters is like a tennis court without players. Daffy Duck is to a Buck Rogers story what John McEnroe was to tennis. Personality. That is the key, the drum, the fife. Forget the plot.
If you are heartbroken and can’t face the world, you need something with a fantastic plot. You won’t be able to read anything boring because your attention span when you are heartbroken decreases by three-quarters.
Over 80% of the poor are people who have small plots of land and grow their own food and they don’t grow enough to sell much into the marketplace. So they will be hit hard by the worst in climate. They really get hit hard starting in the 20-year time frame and thereafter.
It’s amazing how far you can get into a plot before you figure out what you’re doing.
As in all Abercrombie’s books, friends turn out to be enemies, enemies turn out to be friends; the line between good and evil is murky indeed; and nothing goes quite as we expect. With eye-popping plot twists and rollicking good action, Half a King is definitely a full adventure.
Soils and national characters differ, but fairy tales are the same in plot and incidents, if not in treatment.
The cliches are that it’s the most generic Starsky and Hutch plot you can find.
Oh, how great is the power of truth! which of its own power can easily defend itself against all the ingenuity and cunning and wisdom of men, and against the treacherous plots of all the world.
I’m not so sure that I can teach people how to, you know, write dialogue or create plot or anything like that. But if I can get them and grab them by the scruff of the neck and say, you can do this, and if I see that fire in their eyes, that’s when I think I know a writer.
The author always loads his dice, but he must never let the reader see that he has done so, and by the manipulation of his plot, he can engage the reader’s attention so that he does not perceive the violence that has been done to him.
I get a lot of inspiration from Japanese manga, especially shoujo which tends to have elaborate and fantastical adventure plots.
I think the great thing about the Jack Ryan films is that the plot and the story always take center stage. If you’ve done your job as the actor portraying Jack Ryan, you are present enough to make an impact, but you let the story shine.
But he doesn’t love her. I invented that. It is a plot if you imagine people in love–the lazy looping criss crosses of love, blows, stares, tears. No. It doesn’t happen. No love. People meet, touch, stare into one another’s faces, shake their heads clear, move on, forget. It doesn’t happen.
In our society mothers take the place elsewhere occupied by the Fates, the System, Negroes, Communism or Reactionary Imperialist Plots; mothers go on getting blamed until they’re eighty, but shouldn’t take it personally.
Integration is the biggest con job ever pulled on any group of people, any nationality in the world. It was a plot by white liberals to gain black political power for themselves and their wild ideas, and for a few black bourgeoisie who were paid to exercise leverage as black spokesmen.
Once somebody’s aware of a plot, it’s like a bone sticking out. If it breaks through the skin, it’s very ugly.
Part of the mystique of shows like ‘Curb Your Enthusiasm’ is the idea that they begin with a couple of plot lines, and then a bunch of geniuses improvise dialogue. It’s not quite that unstructured and loose. It makes for a good urban myth, but everything’s a little more tightly scripted and programmed than that.
The sentence imposed on Abdul Kadir sends a powerful and clear message. We will bring to justice those who plot to attack the United States of America.
You learn different things through fiction. Historians are always making a plot about how certain things came to happen. Whereas a novelist looks at tiny little things and builds up a sort of map, like a painting, so that you see the shapes of things.
I eat broccoli. I think about the plot. I pace in circles for hours, counter-clockwise, listening to music. I try to think of one detail in the scene I’m about to write that I’m really excited about writing. Until I can come up with that one detail, I pace.
No one would have known, from how he held my hand, [that] over the years of heartache he had hatched a plot to change my life forever. He held his grip and would not let me go. I do not know what joins the parts of an atom, but it seems what binds one human to another is pain.
I just focus on getting the first scene right, with a few lines about the overall plot, and then the book grows organically.
Through rationality we shall become awesome, and invent and test systematic methods for making people awesome, and plot to optimize everything in sight, and the more fun we have the more people will want to join us.
I’ve never really found inspiration for story ideas in the news, but I’d say it certainly affects our lives in so many ways. I would say that certainly the stories of the day appear in the work – I just have never gone so far as to say, well, this particular event could influence a plot of an entire book.
A mystery novel localizes the awesome force of the real death outside the book, winds it tightly in a plot.
I consider myself to be an inverse paranoid. I always operate as if everything is part of a universal plot to enhance my well-being.
Use what you know. Draw from it. It doesnt always mean plot or fact. It means capturing a truth from your experiencing it, expressing values you personally feel deep down in your core.
When sex is necessary for the plot of a book, or a character development, then I don’t shy away from it. Why should I?
The difficulty in the way of writing a children’s play is that Barrie was born too soon. Many people must have felt the same about Shakespeare. We who came later have no chance. What fun to have been Adam, and to have had the whole world of plots and jokes and stories at one’s disposal.
‘The Secret Agent,’ Joseph Conrad’s 1907 novel about an anarchist plot to blow up the Royal Observatory at Greenwich – in fact, a scheme by a secret police agent to stir up a government backlash – has acquired a kind of cult status as the classic novel for the post-9/11 age.
It’s hard to write a good play because it’s hard to structure a plot. If you can think of it off the top of your head, so can the audience.
Personally, I avoid deus ex machina like the plague – if you have to use one, it means you failed to set up the universe and the plot properly. It’s like a whodunnit where there’s no actual way for the reader to identify the perpetrator before the climactic reveal: there’s no sense of closure for the reader.
When I started in television, it was brand new. It was the miracle over in the corner of your room. Now the audience has seen every story line. People have heard every joke. They can predict the plot almost before a show starts. That’s a hard, sophisticated audience to reach.
It’s not the plot [of Valley of Violence] – the plot is the reason to get all these things to happen, all these character moments to happen. It was always meant to have these two perspectives.
The process is different for every book, but there are similarities. I always draw from the inside out. I don’t plot them ahead of time, and I’m always surprised by things that happen in my books.
The world of fiction is a sovereign world that comes to life in the author’s head and follows the rules of art, of literature. And that is the major difference that is reflected in the form of the work, in its language and its plot. An author invents every aspect of a fiction, every detail.
Life and career are the same thing. Every life has to have a plot and a plan. You have to recognize this early and be quite cold-blooded in the discovery and articulation of that plot.
I started Pilates. I’m the only guy in there. They plot before I get there: ‘How can we make John look ridiculous?’ Because every exercise involved my legs up, like I’m in the stirrups or something.
Time is the metre, memory the only plot.
Good characters the reader cares about combined with an intriguing plot. Do those two and you’ve got it made.
I don’t relax, I don’t celebrate. I sit and plot.
Plot is a literary convention. Story is a force of nature.
My goal is to write books that are quality books with very real characters and a gripping plot.
My parents and I always look at movies and just think, ‘What’s missing?’ from the plot to the people of color or diversity in general.
My muse is an ungrateful harlot who’s abandoned me to actually come up with my own plots.
Our easiest approach to a definition of any aspect of fiction is always by considering the sort of demand it makes on the reader. Curiosity for the story, human feelings and a sense of value for the characters, intelligence and memory for the plot. What does fantasy ask of us? It asks us to pay something extra.
I’m probably more character-driven than plot-driven. It’s rare for me to attach myself to an idea for a story.
The don’t-ask-don’t-tell approach to plot and character that ‘The Hurt Locker’ relies on to set itself in motion doesn’t offend me politically. It offends me as a storyteller.
When I storyboard, they’re just fragments of thoughts. I write in three acts like a movie, so I have my plot points up on the preliminary storyboard.
Bausch is a wonderful storyteller. He’s a mature writer who has a lot of confidence in the quality of character. He doesn’t need to hook you with a sneaky plot and zany characters.
I love a well-plotted story. But I’m just not that kind of writer, and it’s not necessarily by choice. When I manipulate plot, I feel I lose authenticity.
The more films and TV shows I spoil for myself, the more I am convinced that truly interesting stories can’t be ruined – the plot thickens with the viewing like a rich sauce.
As the plot of ‘Condor’ unfolds, you’ll understand that nothing is sacred in the pharmacy world or in the behind-the-scenes workings of the CIA and FBI.
You know, Motorcycle Diaries has no incredible stories, no sudden plot twists, it doesn’t play that way. It’s about recognizing that instance of change and embracing it.
Life doesn’t have plots and subplots and denouements. It’s just a big collection of loose ends and dangling threads that never get explained.
Rashly,
And praised be rashness for it–let us know,
Our indiscretion sometime serves us well
When our deep plots do pall, and that should learn us
There’s a divinity that shapes our ends,
Rough-hew them how we will
And praised be rashness for it–let us know,
Our indiscretion sometime serves us well
When our deep plots do pall, and that should learn us
There’s a divinity that shapes our ends,
Rough-hew them how we will
I keep an elaborate calendar for my characters detailing on which dates everything happens. Im constantly revising this as I go along. It gives me the freedom to intricately plot my story, knowing it will at least hold up on a timeline.
I’ve paid the price; I definitely have a reputation that precedes me, and there is a camp that plots my demise. But then again… it’s funner that way.
Bangkok 8 is one of the most startling and provocative mysteries that I’ve read in years. The characters are marvelously unique, the setting is intoxicating and the plot unwinds in dark illusory strands, reminiscent of Gorky Park. Once I started, I didn’t want to put it down.
Even if the experience in my stories is not autobiographical and the actual plot is not autobiographical, the emotion is always somewhat autobiographical. I think there’s some of me in every one of the stories.
We don’t experience our lives as plots. If I asked you to tell me what your last week was like, you’re not really gonna give me plot. You’re gonna give me sort of linked narrative. And I wanted to see how do we bring that into fiction without losing the reader.
If something is crucial to the plot, then I’d better be sure I’ve got my facts straight. Readers of crime novels are smart and savvy, and they’ll waste no time letting me know if there’s a hole in my plot.
In ‘Notting Hill,’ I was part of a whole plot line over six scenes that was completely taken out. That was rather depressing.
I actually think it’s going to be the intriguing plot [ in Black Snake Moan] point that brings people into the film.
As for vegetables, I do not consider a plot of ground devoted to them worthy of the honorable name of garden. Vegetables are, of course, a part of gardening, but the least, the last, -for those who do not have to raise them, the most dishonorable part.
I hate SF books that think all you need to make a book is cool technology and mind-bending ideas without a decent plot or characters. And I hate when fantasy books are allowed to ramble off into five hundred page diatribes which don’t advance the story one bit.
I did the X-Men, and I plotted the stories, and Roy Thomas dialogued them. And that first set of comic books that I did are the plot that the first X-Men movie was taken from, where Magneto invents a machine that turns regular humans into mutants. That’s my idea.
You say fate is almost indispensable to literature – I think it’s completely indispensable, at least in a novel, because a novel always has a plot. Even if nothing happens, even if someone just spends a day walking around Dublin, or whatever, there’s still something going on.
“Novels and gardens,” she says. “I like to move from plot to plot.”
I think it goes without saying that young would-be playwrights in developmental workshops should be so lucky as to write plays as good as ‘Waiting for Godot,’ ‘Uncle Vanya’ or ‘King Lear,’ none of which would have existed without a decent plot.
Creating the characters is the most creative part of the novel except for the language itself. There I am, sitting in front of my computer in right-brain mode, typing the things that come to mind – which become the seeds of plot. It’s scary, though, because I always wonder: Is it going to be there this time?
A plot without action is like pasta without garlic, like Dolly Parton without cleavage, and like a writer without his similes.
Cartoons for girls don’t have to be a puddle of smooshy, cutesy-wootsy, goody-two-shoeness. Girls like stories with real conflict; girls are smart enough to understand complex plots; girls aren’t as easily frightened as everyone seems to think.
There is very little that is accidental in my work. I believe in serendipity for developments of plot, but the actual writing is arrived at by very hard work. The joy of writing doesn’t mean that you don’t get the backaches and headaches and the days when it’s not coming.
If I’m going to say anything about John Edwards in the future, I’ll just wish he had been killed in a terrorist assassination plot.
Having a sense of purpose is having a sense of self. A course to plot is a destination to hope for.
For all of its well-deserved reputation for pragmatism, American popular culture frequently nurtures or at least tolerates preposterous views and theories. Witness the 9/11 ‘truthers’ who, lacking any evidence whatsoever, claim that 9/11 was a Bush administration plot.
Language is the ticket to plot and character, after all, because both are built out of language.
You asked what is the secret of a really good sketch. And it is a sketch is a small play. It’s got a beginning, and a middle and an end. It should have a plot; it should have the characters, conflict. It is a little play. And in it, will be funny stuff.
We don’t usually start out with a plot that we can pitch in two lines. We spend a year brainstorming and discussing ideas that are sometimes of a visual nature, sometimes just about characters and then we try to structure the story.
[On the movie “American Hot Wax:] A plot so thin you could thread a needle with it.
Some people’s lives seem to flow in a narrative; mine had many stops and starts. That’s what trauma does. It interrupts the plot. You can’t process it because it doesn’t fit with what came before or what comes afterwards.
He obtained from Congress the right to borrow from the people by selling to it the ‘bonds’ of States … and the Government and the nation escaped the plots of the foreign financiers. They understood at once, that the United States would escape their grip. The death of Lincoln was resolved upon.
Growing nations should remember that, in nature, no tree, though placed in the best conditions of light, soil, and plot, can continue to grow and spread indefinitely.
The more subtle and elegant you are in hiding your plot points, the better you are as a writer.
The art of the dramatist is very like the art of the architect. A plot has to be built up just as a house is built-story after story; and no edifice has any chance of standing unless it has a broad foundation and a solid frame.
[In plotting earthquake measurements] the range between the largest and smallest magnitudes seemed unmanageably large. Dr. Beno Gutenberg then made the natural suggestion to plot the amplitudes logarithmically.
I make very involved drawings, even little structures, and try using design to figure out the rhythm of a plot. If there are several narrators then a clue has to pop up in the first line. There have to be certain grammatical clues, or distinctive names.
I’ve got to formulate a plot or end up in jail or shot, success is my only option, failure’s not.
I had to learn the image is not the word, which is a jolt for a literary soul. But it has served me well in terms of understanding plot, in terms of watching actors develop characters.
It’s like low-budget filmmaking – a focus on dialogue and relationships over plot. Quirky. Improv.
So much of the literature we had to read for high school English class was filled with victimized, tragic, symbolic women who spurred the plot forward with their inevitable shunning/death/shunning-followed-by-pregnancy-followed-by-death timelines.
I was a theater actor back in the U.K., and you knew the whole play, so you could plot your storyline and character. And then I did ‘Lost’ and didn’t know, and it was kind of frustrating, but I enjoyed it.
I don’t know exactly why the notion of homeownership has such a grasp on the American imagination. Perhaps as descendants of landless immigrants we turn our plots into symbols of stability.
In a way, this kind of insight or recognition often permeates the way I think of character, how I plot action, and the way in which I use imagery, seeing binaries as false.
I’ve always wrestled with the difference between plot and structure, and after re-reading a lot of writing books I realized I wasn’t alone.
If you’ve got a plot the size of a car or a tiny yard in Italy, you’re going to be growing tomatoes and basil and celery and carrots, and everybody is still connected to the land.
I was not the young heroic model for ‘Hamlet.’ I tended to play those characters that orbited around them: the rogues and the rat bags and the idiots and the fools and the clowns that sway the plot somehow from a tangent.
I know my fans want me on the screen. But I think hero-worship should not be allowed to corrupt the plot and narrative of a film.
The spirit of Jane Eyre looms over Once Upon a Day. В Lisa Tucker keeps the plot of this gothic novel bubbling with tons of juicy family secrets.
I’m not interested in plots. I’m interested only in the characterization of people and what they do.
There is no better place to plot the death of a character than when you’re miserable and working out.
I like dramas because there’s a big overlap between film and fiction, so I feel relatively qualified to talk about plot and characterisation and that sort of thing.
When I wrote Rick, I had the idea that I would take the plot of nearly every opera and turn it into a dark film, which is something I still may do.
I don’t know how to write a novel in the world of cellphones. I don’t know how to write a novel in the world of Google, in which all factual information is available to all characters. So I have to stand on my head to contrive a plot in which the characters lose their cellphone and are separated from technology.
I think this is the first time I’ve altered a book based on what you guys told me. So it’s an occasion! Soon I’ll be putting up polls to choose between plots, and then it’s a short stop to accepting anonymous contributions and stapling them together while I sip margaritas on the deck of a Pacific cruise ship.
Any claim to actual identification as a drama must rest upon the construction of a plot independent of the assignment of affliction to the protagonist.
Most games follow a real railroad plot, no matter what you want, you’re following their storyline to its unavoidable conclusion. I’d like to write a game where your character can follow any number of possible story arcs and sub-plots.
The whole magic of a plot requires that somebody be impeded from getting something over with.
How can such episodes of such savage cruelty happen? The heart of man is an abyss out of which sometimes emerge plots of unspeakable ferocity capable of overturning in an instant the tranquil and productive life of a people.
What terrifies me? When I read about plots of evil taking over the world and obliterating women’s hard-won rights.
I don’t keep anything on paper (except within an actual novel in progress, at which point I need a file to keep track of plot threads, characters, and so on).
Two things I do well in books are sex and violence, but I don’t want gratuitous sex or violence. The sex and violence are only as graphic as need be. And never included unless it furthers the plot or character development
I was Paul Schrader’s assistant for six months before I went to film school, and he’s very much about knowing what’s going to happen on every page before you even start writing dialogue – the entire plot and character arcs are mapped out.
I’m not like a Sears Catalog of ideas. I don’t have that many ideas. I’ve more or less written them over the years. Usually, I come up with a situation or a character, and it rattles around in my head until the story or the plot emerges.
In a lot of ways, TV writing taught me how to be a good storyteller. I learned about dialogue, scenes, moving the plot forward.
Why does God allow evil in the world? To thicken the plot.
Sometimes I’ll hear a phrase or a word and write it down in my little black notebook (a writer’s best mate), then come back to it and work a plot around it.
I don’t plot, and I don’t plan. I like to be surprised like the reader.
I like writing non-fiction – and when you pick a [non-fiction] subject, it saves you the hassle of coming up with a plot.
If you stop one terror attack in the U.S., it may be connected to multiple other plots out there that are connected. If you reveal that you stopped one plot, it may tip our hand.
Every time I read anything, whether it be a book, a script, or anything, I automatically imagine myself as the boy in the plot. I don’t know why. Seriously, anything. If I’m reading a magazine article or whatever, I picture myself as the kid people are talking about. It’s really weird. I don’t know why I do that.
Life is not a plot; it’s in the details.
The 9/11 attack itself played out around the world, with planning meetings in Malaysia, operatives taking flight lessons in the United States, coordination by plot leaders based in Hamburg, and money transfers from Dubai – activities overseen by al-Qaeda’s senior command from secure bases in Afghanistan.
Resolution and conclusion are inherent in a plot-driven narrative.
Events, time, forms, all propel the inner plot within each of us.
The Cloud Roads has wildly original worldbuilding, diverse and engaging characters, and a thrilling adventure plot. It’s that rarest of fantasies: fresh and surprising, with a story that doesn’t go where ten thousand others have gone before. I can’t wait for my next chance to visit the Three Worlds!
A free and prosperous Iraq will be a major blow to the terrorists and their desire to establish a safe haven in Iraq where they can plan and plot attacks
All the plots of hell and commotions on earth have not so much as shaken God’s hand to spoil one letter or line he has been drawing.
We must clearly see that international hostile forces are intensifying the strategic plot of Westernizing and dividing China, and ideological and cultural fields are the focal areas of their long-term infiltration.
Nonfiction ties your hands a bit, and just like writing poetry in rhyme, it can force you to make more brutal decisions in terms of word choice, plot, etc.
I’m very good at plot.
For years, I sort of would try to write a story that somehow fit the title. And I don’t think it happened for maybe another four years that I actually thought of a story, the plot of a story that corresponded to that phrase.
In a very literal way, of course, Shakespeare did change the course of history: when it didn’t fit the plot he had in mind, he simply rewrote it. His English histories play fast and loose with chronology and fact to achieve the desired dramatic effect, re-ordering history even as it was then understood.
I don’t care how good a song is. If it holds back the storyline, stalls the plot, your audience will reject it.
In comics, there are depths that don’t reveal themselves immediately, and the stuff that you might consider anal about ‘Watching the Watchmen’ – like the notes where I plot the rotation of a perfume bottle through the air – might not be particularly obvious to anyone who reads it.
Every book has got its challenges. You run into a plot point that you can’t figure out, or a scene that you struggle to write and have to write 50 times.
It’s so real.” “Most dreams are. It isn’t until you wake up that you see all the plot holes.
He who wants to keep his garden tidy doesn’t reserve a plot for weeds.
In the best nonfiction, it seems to me, you’re always made aware that you are being engaged with a supple mind at work. The story line or plot in nonfiction consists of the twists and turns of a thought process working itself out.
I think action should be revealed through character, so if you have a plot problem, it’s probably a character problem.
I feel that discussing story-writing in terms of plot, character, and theme is like trying to describe the expression on a face by saying where the eyes, nose, and mouth are.
But short films are not inferior, just different. I think the short gives a freedom to film-makers. What’s appealing is that you don’t have as much responsibility for storytelling and plot. They can be more like a portrait, or a poem.
Even a dream as inspiration doesn’t mean anything unless you then find that it’s sparked an actual story with a plot.
According to the media, trans women were subject to pain and punch lines. Instead of proclaiming that I was not a plot device to be laughed at, I spent my younger years internalizing and fighting those stereotypes.
Plot was always secondary in my mind.
One thing that we learned that we published on our blog post is that uniformly, men lie about their height by almost exactly two inches. So if you look at a plot of census bureau data on the distribution of men’s heights in the U.S. and you plot men’s heights on OKCupid, it is exactly shifted two inches to the left.
The thing with ‘The Girl with a Dragon Tattoo’ is that is it’s like an Agatha Christie plot, and an investigating journalist is also a classic character.
I always think plot is what you fall back on if you can’t write, to keep things going.
Many of my favorite films, if someone were to tell me simply what they’re about, I probably wouldn’t be that interested. Plot often has so little to do with what’s at the heart of a film.
The way that Dickens structured his books has a form that we most readily recognize now from, say, the great T.V. series, like ‘The Wire’ or ‘The Sopranos.’ There’s one central plot line, but then from that spin off all kinds of subplots.
Usually when I put my focus on the pacing, the plot, the specific characterizations, – it’s ironic – but then I actually increase my chances of writing something that moves people because I haven’t become too self-conscious of the goal.
I want the plot to be as complicated as possible. Usually I’ll write all the way through to an end, and then I go back and try to fix the ending so that it makes sense. I don’t think out the plot ahead of time.
Life is a voyage, and we are all sailing under sealed orders. We plan, plot, scheme and arrange, and some fine day Fate steps in and our dreams are tossed into the yeasty deep. We grin and bear it–anyway we bear it: it is the only thing to do.
Anytime I feel like I am beginning to explain the plot or characters too much my stomach churns. I like stories that let the characters speak for themselves and don’t give you all the information.
… We must remember that there’s more than one story and plot in every novel. There are at least as many stories as there are main characters, and each of these stories has to have multiple plots to keep it going – blood and bone, nerve and tissue, forgotten longing and unknown events.
With the Red Sox, you have more of a literary interest in it. You know they’re going to lose; you’re just interested in how the plot is going to unfold.
I definitely feel that plot flows from character. I don’t believe that you can construct a plot and insert people into it.
No matter how much you know, no matter how much you think, no matter how much you plot and you connive and you plan, you’re not superior to sex. It’s a very risky game…. It’s sex that disorders our normally ordered lives.
A lot of my early career, I wrote story songs that had narratives, that had plots.
But how can the characters in a play guess the plot? We are not the playwright, we are not the producer, we are not even the audience. We are on the stage. To play well the scenes in which we are “on” concerns us much more than to guess about the scenes that follow it.
The whole of life is just like watching a film. Only it’s as though you always get in ten minutes after the big picture has started, and no-one will tell you the plot, so you have to work it out all yourself from the clues.
Plot is a framework on which to drape other things. So once that’s working, I can just let it go and do all the stuff that I love – ‘Trojan horse’ it. There are so many great YA heroines, and that’s fantastic, but what about the emotionally complex boy out there? That’s who I tend to write about.
Marriage seemed like such a small space whenever I was in it. I liked the getting married. Courtship has a plotline. But there’s no plot to being married. Just the same things over and over again. Same fights, same friends, same things you do on a Saturday. The repetition would start to get to me.
I find the best way to make things real is to just put two characters into a space and let them talk to each other in the way that they would talk to each other, and then see what they would say. I know it sounds weird, but that leads the plot and takes you in another direction.
In tragic life, God wot, No villain need be! Passions spin the plot: We are betrayed by what is false within.
I always wanted to, at some point, sit down and consider how to plot out one piece of work, one album, from start to finish.
I’m more interested in plot than theme, but I hope my values find their way into my stories: kindness, sympathy, effort, and humor!
My dad was a breeder. Most of his work happened in little test plots and didn’t require much labor. He tried growing them for a while, and realized that farming is hard. It’s just brutally hard. We didn’t have the interest or fortitude to farm.
I love developing children as characters. Children rarely have important roles in literary fiction – they are usually defined as cute or precious, or they create a plot by being kidnapped or dying.
There is no ‘right’ way to begin a novel, but for me, plot has to wait. The character comes first.
The reality is that my wife would be pretty upset if I went and bought a plot of land somewhere in Outer Mongolia or the Arctic Circle!
The winner must promote social jusitce, remove corruption and discrmination, and stand against political, cultural and economic plots.
Whenever I’ve had to tamper with history for plot purposes, I make sure to mention that in my author’s note, and I try to keep such tampering to a bare minimum. I also attempt to keep my characters true to their historical counterparts. This is not always possible, of course.
People ask me why I can still smile on the pitch when we’re losing. I tell them that if you lose your smile and stop being happy, you should find yourself a plot in the graveyard.
I like being able to go to the cinema and sit and spend time observing something without thinking about plot or what one character is saying. I feel like I’m able to connect on a much more profound level.
At the time I begin writing a novel, the last thing I want to do is follow a plot outline. To know too much at the start takes the pleasure out of discovering what the book is about.
While I am usually in despair when a movie abandons its plot for a third act given over entirely to action, I have no problem with the way Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets ends, because it has been pointing toward this ending, hinting about it, preparing us for it, all the way through. What a glorious movie.
One of the most striking elements of today’s threat picture is that plots to attack America increasingly involve American residents and citizens.
The core plot of ‘Mercury’ is so gripping that when I thought of making it as a silent film, it only made it more interesting. Once I finished writing the first draft, making a silent film that’s both thrilling and engaging seemed possible. When the film team read the final script, they felt the same.
I’m not willing to risk more terrorist plots succeeding and more paedophiles going free.
Normally I start with a plot, and write a synopsis, and the ideas come from the construction.
I began to be impressed by what made a good book-how you needed to have a sensible story, a plot that developed, with a beginning, a middle, and an end that would tie everything together.
Some writers can produce marvelous plots without planning it out, but I can’t. In particular I need to know the structure of a novel: what’s going to happen in each chapter and each scene.
I know from experience that I make the best decisions when I’m into the story and inspired by the story, not when I’m sitting there trying to plot.
God, I’d love to do a big commercial movie that made a lot of money and whose plot was interesting too.
As president, Clinton sold burial plots in Arlington Cemetery and liberals shrugged it off. What really gets their goat is the autopen. Evidently, the important thing was that every one of those pardons Clinton sold for cash on his last day in office was signed by Bill Clinton personally.
Every couple I know has side-by-side grave plots, but when we do it we’re the biggest weirdos on the block.
I did green screen for the first time! I wouldn’t like to do a whole movie of green screen, though. You kind of forget the plot a little – like being in a Broadway play and doing it over and over and forgetting your line halfway through.
The most challenging and exciting aspect is the outline and formation of the plot points. This is the stage where the notion of the story begins to take shape, and I can see glimpses of what is to come.
Paul Levinson has outdone himself: The Plot to Save Socrates is a philosophically rich gem full of big ideas and wonderful time-travel tricks.
I started out as a poet who primarily wanted to write about image and moment. Over the years I’ve been trying to teach myself how to do plot and scene. My first story collection had the most issues with the plotlessness, and when I was writing my second collection I was teaching myself how to make things happen.
A page a day means I need to focus on a gag a day, and that’s great for laughs but bad for plot, and I’m primarily a plot guy.
One of the stories that dominates our family literature was the fact that my maternal grandfather contracted for – I don’t know under what terms – but, for a large section of the old slave plantation. He established himself – sisters and brothers, cousins, etc. on fifty- and sixty-acre plots.
I think of a plot, I think of an idea, and then I wonder, How can I get that onto the stage? . . . Whatever devices you use should always be there to serve the theme. If the theme has been overtaken by the device, then something’s wrong.
When you look back on your life, it looks as though it were a plot, but when you are into it, it’s a mess: just one surprise after another. Then, later, you see it was perfect.
When Melissa McCarthy came out with ‘Bridesmaids,’ all of a sudden you saw a plus-sized woman who had three dimensions, was not an appendage, was pivotal to the plot.
A plot begins when somebody has something to hide.
Life doesn’t come in plot points or setups and payoffs. Life washes over you and passes.
‘Paquita’ has a patchy history, beginning in 1846, and a patchy plot.
I’m told my SF is of the hard variety and my Fantasy is romantic but hopefully all the characters are strong and the plots are lively.
It would not be amiss for the novice to write the last paragraph of his story first, once a synopsis of the plot has been carefully prepared – as it always should be.
When I begin writing, I have no idea what my novels are ultimately going to be about. I don’t have a plot. I never consider a theme. I don’t make notes or outlines.
But, as an actress, you don’t want to run into these scenes, willy-nilly. The couple that I did do were important for the character and essential to the plot, to show what was actually going on between each character. It is great to be able to have that, and to be able to say certain things and have certain passions.
One elephant having a trunk was odd; but all elephants having trunks looked like a plot.
I think modern television shows, with their intricate plots, are stimulating our minds. This is one reason IQs have been going up.
For whatever reason, thus far it’s been important to me not to write that kind of collection. Which means that I’ve spent months playing tic-tac-notecard, trying to get the stories in an order whereby stories that are similar in any given way (diction, narrative stance, setting, plot) are separated by others that aren’t.
In everything I’ve written, the crime has always just been an occasion to write about other things. I don’t have a picture of myself as writing crime novels. I like fairly strong narratives, but it’s a way of getting a plot moving.
Every work [of literature] has both a situation and a story. The situation is the context or circumstance, sometimes the plot; the story is the emotional experience that preoccupies the writer: the insight, the wisdom, the thing one has come to say
When it comes to a character, I make sure that it adds to the plot.
I admire Dickens beyond words. He is one of the greatest plotters of all times. Didn’t have a clue about women, but he sure could plot.
Europe is being absolutely swamped and destroyed with the crime and the problems, and it could be some sinister plot.
Plot comes first. The plot is the archictecture of your novel. You wouldn’t build a house without a plan. If I wrote without a plot, it would just be a pile of bricks. Characters are your servants. They must serve your plot.
Plots behind plots, plans behind plans. There was always another secret.
Delicious… Everything I’d hoped for in a new Wild Cards book. The character interactions and plot twists have exactly the complexity, surprise, and unsentimental realism I’d expect out of a George R. R. Martin project.
All my life I thought that the story was over when the hero and heroine were safely engaged — after all, what’s good enough for Jane Austen ought to be good enough for anyone. But it’s a lie. The story is about to begin, and every day will be a new piece of the plot.
With relatively few exceptions, the novel sacrifices too much, for me, on the altar of plot.
Making up characters and places and plots, unlike fixing your plumbing or doing dishes, is anything but practical or rational. I write what needs to be written the way that seems genuinely right.
I don’t like to go to the movies to see violence or some kind of spy thing with all kinds of information you have to assimilate to understand the plot.
When you’re watching a Hitchcock movie, you, for most of the movie, are playing the guessing game. What’s the endgame? What’s the plot? How are these people involved? It’s the best way to tell the story, and as a viewer, that’s what you want to experience.
Writers often like to talk about how intuitive the writing process is, but in truth, building a book is a remarkably unintuitive task. Or, to put it more accurately, you need a lot more than intuition. You need plot and characters. You need a setting. You need a theme that is relevant and supported by your text.
Blair liked to think of herself as a hopeless romantic in the style of old movie actresses like Audrey Hepburn and Marilyn Monroe. She was always coming up with plot devices for the movie she was starring in at the moment, the movie that was her life.
The earliest maps were ‘story’ maps. Cartographers were artists who mingled knowledge with supposition, memory and fears. Their maps described both landscape and the events, which had taken place within it, enabling travellers to plot a route as well as to experience a story.
The needlework of lies and rumors seeks to distract peoples attention from the daily business of governance under the Presidents leadership. Those who continually plot for the Presidents downfall will never succeed because she is a hard-working President with no other agenda than to promote our peoples welfare
You’re always trying to learn from the past to plot a course in the future that will be better. You’re always trying to learn.
The older I get and the more fiction I write, the more I outline, the more I think about plot before I dive in and plunge too far.
Think of it as the Doorway of No Return. The feeling must be that your lead character, once she passes through, cannot go home again until the major problem of the plot is solved.
To love truth for truth’s sake is the principal part of human perfection in this world, and the seed-plot of all other virtues.
Since a photograph is frozen and mute, since there is no before and after, I don’t want there to be a conscious awareness of any kind of literal narrative. And that’s why I really try not to pump up motivation or plot or anything like that.
The way I pack is I look at how long I’ll be gone and I pack day for day. If I’m going on a three-day fishing trip, I plot each day. I put most of that in a little bag. If I’m going from there to work on golf courses for a few days, I plot that trip.
I don’t care how good a song is – if it holds back the storyline, stalls the plot, your audience will reject it.
If, technologically, it is possible to make an impenetrable device or system where the encryption is so strong that there’s no key – there’s no door at all – then how do we apprehend the child pornographer? How do we solve or disrupt a terrorist plot?
I want my stories to be understood and enjoyed by anyone, so I need ‘beta-readers’ who will tell me when the plot is working or not working, and when my writing is concise or vague.
I write fast. But it takes me a while to get going. It’s very important for me to see my whole plot. I have to see the end first because I like a surprise in the end. Which is why I let characters and plot gestate in my mind.
You don’t idea your way into a plot but plot your way into an idea.
I do see a lot of roles that are, like, the girlfriend or the love interest or the girl next door. Maybe not totally well-rounded kinds of characters – women who are more of a plot device in a way.
I earned my Ph.D. in philosophy, and one of my specializations was the logic and mathematics of game theory. I’ve also got a degree in drama, so I know about stories, characterizations, plot arcs, and the like. Lots of game designers can do one or the other: I’ve got the skills for both.
Character is plot, and casting is character.
The families of rabbits or woodchucks will eat the salad greens just before they are ready to be picked; I plot ways to kill these animals but can never bring myself to do it.
There’s a lot of two-hander dialogue in ‘True Detective,’ and I needed to place those guys in locations where there were other levels of visual storytelling. It didn’t necessarily have to move the plot forward, but it had to add tone or add to the overall feeling.
‘Liv and Maddie’ actually started out as a different show called ‘Bits and Pieces,’ and it was a completely different plot, although it was the same cast.
The Thickety is a sinister, magical debut with a marvelous and shocking heroine. J.A. White’s elegant writing and masterful plot kept me turning pages late into the night.
Place a beehive on my grave And let the honey soak through. When I’m dead and gone, That’s what I want from you. The streets of heaven are gold and sunny, But I’ll stick with my plot and a pot of honey. Place a beehive on my grave And let the honey soak through.
I think plot is very overrated. Plot is obviously necessary, but what I really care about is emotionally affecting the audience. Having a thought myself and then an emotional experience myself, somehow transferring that to the audience.
I don’t plot the books out ahead of time, I don’t plan them. I don’t begin at the beginning and end at the end. I don’t work with an outline and I don’t work in a straight line.
I used to be enamored of object-oriented programming. I’m now finding myself leaning toward believing that it is a plot designed to destroy joy.
Part of being innovative in government is sometimes not trying to plot out the last chapter of the book, but to be open and see what comes back.
I’ve always figured the only way I could finish a book and get a plot was just to keep making it longer and longer until something happens – you know, until it finds its own plot – because you can’t outline and then fit the thing into it. I suppose it’s a slow way of working.
The thing should have plot and character, beginning, middle and end. Arouse pity and then have a catharsis. Those were the best principles I was ever taught.
I start with an image, then I go from the image toward exploring the situation. Then I write a scene, and from the scene I find the character, from the character I find the larger plot. It’s like deductive reasoning – I start with the smaller stuff and work backward.
The Prime Minister seems now to be basing his re-election campaign on this plot line. He is saying to the Australian people, look out, the baddies behind you – hiss, boo and whatever you do, don’t vote Labor. This political parody of pantomime is looking and sounding desperate.
Considerations of plot do a great deal of heavy lifting when it comes to long-form narrative – readers will overlook the most ham-fisted prose if only a writer can make them long to know what happens next.
If you create a movie that is only character driven, with a weak plot, then you – as a director, you have to make sure you keep pushing the tempo.
I had to kiss it [ playing Hamlet] goodbye because Marvel have to plot things for the next three, four years.
That is what I define as a novel: something that has a beginning, a middle and an end, with characters and a plot that sustain interest from the first sentence to the last. But that is not what I do at all.
Characterization is not divorced from plot, not a coat of paint you slap on after the structure of events is already built. Rather characterization is inseparable from plot.
‘At Freddie’s’ takes place in 1960s London at the Temple Stage School for child actors. It has a plot that makes you feel sorry for the people who have to write summaries on the backs of books.
I really try to plot in a fearless fashion. I try not to care about not knowing the answer before I get there; I just jump in first and see what happens.
It’s hard to plan and plot attacks against America if you’re on the run, and that’s exactly what our brave professionals are doing.
A lot of the fun of ‘Gravity Falls’ comes from the secrecy surrounding the plot. We want fans to be able to guess and speculate, to be surprised by twists and be engaged when they get things right.
When we try to push the envelope, there are certain sectors of society that say this is a Zionist plot to sort of destabilize our country, or this is an American agenda.
Plot is a map and I begin with it. It is what made me admire the novels of the 19th century; that the stories are foreshadowed. TheyГ•re going someplace.
I’ve learned that in the theater the story is everything. Every lyric, every line and every musical gesture has to propel the journey of a given character or the overall plot.
Conspiracy! Intrigue! A rapidly thickening plot! Add some bestiality and a lecherous priest and I’d say you have the beginnings of a beautiful novel.
The solution to the novel’s legal problem is a satisfyingly intricate one, and nobody will want his money back on the plot. But the echoes that will remain in your mind after you’ve finished Reversible Errors will mainly have to do with the novel’s other elements.
Nature never deserts the wise and pure; no plot so narrow, be but nature there; no waste so vacant, but may well employ each faculty of sense, and keep the heart awake to love and beauty.
I don’t believe that the world is that crazy that they have nothing to better to do with their time than send me emails and tell me these outlandish stories. So I’ve started to plot the communities that have come to me on a map.
For me, any story I tackle begins with the human relationships and not the plot.
Kajol as Vasundhara is a tough cookie. Raghu and her world collides, and they have different ideologies. The plot revolves around their core beliefs and their disagreement with each other.
I’d love to be able to write crazy epic plots. I’m working on it.
It is very challenging to make a fresh screenplay based on a used plot.
I’m not an enormous proponent of plot as a reader. It’s about other things; my reading has become specialized over the years.
When Moses was alive, these pyramids were a thousand years old. Here began the history of architecture. Here people learned to measure time by a calendar, to plot the stars by astronomy and chart the earth by geometry. And here they developed that most awesome of all ideas – the idea of eternity.
Stand-up is just me trying to be as funny as possible in the most concentrated hour with me standing on stage with no storyline, no plot line, and no character development.
There is only one plot-things are not what they seem.
I think books with weak or translucent plots can survive if the character being drawn along the path is rich, interesting and multi-faceted. The opposite is not true.
I was born inside the movie of my life. The visuals were before me, the audio surrounded me, the plot unfolded inevitably but not necessarily. I don’t remember how I got into the movie, but it continues to entertain me.
What I loved about romances was the character, and I think I still bring that to my novels. What romance taught me was that the ‘who’ will always matter more than the ‘what.’ It’s fun to come up with plots, but I want to make sure the reader cares about who it’s happening to.
A lot of roles for people with disabilities are quite patronising. It’s a real pity when they are just used to give dull PC kudos to a drama, or when they’re wheeled on in a tokenistic way without any real involvement in the plot.
(text message) CMDR ROOT. TRBLE BELOW. HAVN OVRRN BY GOBLINS. PLCE PLAZA SRROUNDED. CUDGEON + OPL KBOI BHND PLOT. NO WPONS OR CMMUNICATIONS. DNA CNONS CNTRLLED BY KBOI. I M TRPPED IN OP BTH. CNCL THNKS IM 2 BLM. IF ALIVE PLSE HLP. IF NOT, WRNG NMBR.
Also, as an author, character has always been what I’m most interested in – much more so than plot or setting, although those are good things too.
The development of the plot of the novel leads to a single point, and it’s my opinion that the ending that the novel has, which is a somewhat ambiguous ending, is the only logical ending given the structure of the book as a whole.
‘Blood Host’ is super heavy. Especially on the verses, it has an industrial stomp. It’s one of my favourite tracks just because the plot of it is so heavy. It’s a total crushing tune; it doesn’t get any heavier than that main riff, just a straight quarter-note powerhouse.
Steve [King] has been incredibly supportive. He’s also really good about getting back to me when I have questions about plot or characterization.
There are many oral historians in America, but my books are made using the rules of novel writing. I have a beginning, a plot, characters.
As someone who is non-binary gender identifying, I feel a particular responsibility to portray members of my community on stage and on screen, not only as fully fleshed-out characters who are integral to the plot, but as characters whose gender identity is just one of many parts that make up the whole person.
Storytelling is about two things; it’s about character and plot.
I don’t usually read my reviews. I’ve noticed older reviewers are much more bothered by the plot complications. Younger reviews don’t seem to be bothered by the complications at all.
I farm a little plot of things to say, with not much frontage on the busy road.
Is it possible Hanukkah doesn’t inspire folksy songs? Plot lines may be a part. The Christmas story has a lot of material to work with. There’s Jesus and his birth, the wise men, their gifts and tons of frankincense.
I think that sometimes, romantic comedies have to be really broad, and that the plot of people falling in and out of love or whatever is not enough. ‘Enough Said’ had that stuff, but I wanted it to be fun and funny while also grounded in reality.
Plot is what happens in your story. Every story needs structure, just as every body needs a skeleton. It is how you ‘flesh out and clothe’ your structure that makes each story unique.
Every so often, you want to map out your plot mythology but never so specifically that you can’t let a story surprise you. You want to allow the type of action of the writer’s room so that you have the ability to take a left turn.
I tried to write about my first marriage in a fictional version but got two pages into it and realised it was too personal. Then I came up with an old-fashioned love triangle, which became the plot for ‘Ralph’s Party.’
I’ve never sat down and thought about the difference between plot and theme. To me, that’s never been important.
Most short stories have but one plot. The very best, however, have what I call a plot-and-a-half – that is, a main plot and a small subplot that feeds in a twist or an unexpected piece of business that ads crunch and flavor to the story as a whole.
In 2011, I negotiated to sell a plot that I owned near the airport to RKW Developers whose director was Dheeraj Wadhawan.
I steer clear of books with ugly covers. And ones that are touted as ‘sweeping,’_ ‘tender’ or ‘universal.’ But to the real question of what’s inside: I avoid books that seem to conservatively follow stale formulas. I don’t read for plot, a story ‘about’ this or that.
Those blessed structures, plot and rhyme–
why are they no help to me now
I want to make
something imagined, not recalled?
why are they no help to me now
I want to make
something imagined, not recalled?
Opponents of civil liberties contend the NSA data collection has made our country more safe, but even the most vocal defenders of the program have failed to identify a single thwarted plot.
My advice to aspiring writers of fantasy trilogies or series is that each book needs two main plots. There’s the ‘big story’, the over-arching grand plot of the entire series, and there is the complete-in-itself, one-book plot.
People are considered pure of heart when they do not approach power and pomp; but those who can be near without being affected are the purest of all. People are considered high-minded when they do not know how to plot and contrive; but those who know how yet do not do so are the highest of all.
Up until ‘Blue Shift,’ ‘Half-Life’ characters were repeating, expendable entities. In ‘Blue Shift,’ important named partners will work with you over the course of several levels and objectives in order to overcome the hazards of the plot.
Oh what would Rome be without a plot?
As for ‘Great Expectations’, it is up there for me with the world’s greatest novels, not least as it vindicates plot as no other novel I can think of does, since what there is to find out is not coincidence or happenstance but the profoundest moral truth.
Sometimes I’ll feel down and realise it’s because of a depressing plot.
Here’s the plot of ‘Interstellar.’ Refugees – they’re known as Democrats – they’re looking for a new planet.
I don’t read for plot, a story ‘about’ this or that. There must be some kind of philosophical depth rendered into the language, something happening.
Each piece of dialogue MUST be “something happening”. . .The “amusing” for its OWN sake should above all be censored. . .The functional use of dialogue for the plot must be the first thing in the writer’s mind. Where functional usefulness cannot be established, dialogue must be left out.
Rollerball is an incoherent mess, a jumble of footage in search of plot, meaning, rhythm and sense. There are bright colors and quick movement on the screen, which we can watch as a visual pattern that, in entertainment value, falls somewhere between a kaleidoscope and a lava lamp.
When the plot flags, bring in a man with a gun.
Everyone must hoe his plot daily.
I am much more aware of making the plot more original, avoiding contrivance, having the story matter much more. I used to think more about symbols consciously. Now I think much more about the story.
The poem has to bear the weight with image, language… the screenplay with dialogue, plot.
I think my favorite film of all time has to be ‘The Illusionist’ by Sylvain Chomet. Beautiful plot, beautiful story. You know, not much happens, but it’s beautiful. And when I was young, ‘The Triplets of Belleville’ was one of my favorite movies. I liked his style a lot.
I had to write something and couldn’t think of a plot, so I decided to write a Cinderella story because it already had a plot! Then, when I thought about Cinderella’s character, I realized that she was too much of a goody-two-shoes for me, and I would hate her before I finished ten pages.
I love the Shakespeare history plays, I love the struggle for the crown as a plot.
Story is about pulling the reader in and a plot is a more externalized mechanism of revelation. A plot is more antic, more performative, and less intimate. When you’re telling a story you’re telling it into someone’s ear.
I’m never so into the three-act movie thing. I know that’s the form that people talk about, but it seems to me, in the movie, you just have to keep charging forward. You couldn’t start over again like you do after an intermission. You just had to keep the plot moving forward.
I consider plot a necessary intrusion on what I really want to do, which is write snappy dialogue. But when I’m writing, the way the words sound is as important to me as what they mean.
Hydrogen peroxide-based bombs were used in the London bombings in 2005; in al Qaeda’s foiled plot to attack subways in New York City in 2009 and also in the ISIS-directed Paris attacks in 2015 and the ISIS-directed attacks in Brussels a year later.
Maybe it’s the spy novelist in me looking for a future plot, but I hope the U.S. and its allies are thinking how to operate ‘unconventionally’ in Iraq and Syria in ways that undermine the Islamic State.
There’s also something happening in television similar to what happened in the ’80s, when people stopped taking so many drugs and wanted to hear real instruments in music again. I think people want plot, story and characters. Those are more important than having a big star.
This world of ours has been constructed like a superbly written novel: we pursue the tale with avidity, hoping to discover the plot.
There are few films where you have women really driving the plot.
There’s that old adage about how there’s only seven plots in the world and Shakespeare’s done them all before.
I have a plot, but not much happens.
I tried writing out a plot with the second or third novel I wrote, and it was so boring, so desperately boring.
If a writer is true to his characters they will give him his plot. Observations must play second fiddle to integrity.
The only way I could finish a book and get a plot was just to keep making it longer until something happens.
If my writing comes to a halt, I head to the shops: I find them very inspirational. And if I get into real trouble with my plot, I go out for a pizza with my husband.
I detest the word plot.В I never, never think of plot.В I think only and solely of character. Give me the characters; I’ll tell you a story-maybe a thousand stories. The interaction between and among human beings is the only story worth telling.
This life is not man’s own show; if he becomes personally and emotionally involved in the very complicated cosmic drama, he reaps inevitable suffering for having distorted the divine ‘plot.’
Plot is very important to me, but I think my stories are stronger in character development.
