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 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.
I realised that what I loved was descriptive writing rather than something with a plot.
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.
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.
With a reality show, the bottom line is, there’s no plot; there’s no finale.
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 have a plot, but not much happens.
There is nothing that’s been in any of my novels that, in my view, hasn’t been either illuminating surroundings or defining a character or moving a plot.
I just focus on getting the first scene right, with a few lines about the overall plot, and then the book grows organically.
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.
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 like having a plot; I like characters with a reason to get up in the morning.
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.
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.
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.
There’s almost always a point in a book where something happens that triggers the rest of the plot.
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.
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.
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.’
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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’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.
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.
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 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.’
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.
Long before the idea of a writer’s conference was a glimmer in anyone’s eye, writers learned by reading the work of their predecessors. They studied meter with Ovid, plot construction with Homer, comedy with Aristophanes; they honed their prose style by absorbing the lucid sentences of Montaigne and Samuel Johnson.
I’m quite adept at writing two or sometimes even three stories at once. So if I get stuck on one story, I switch the next and let my subconscious work on unraveling any plot problems from another story.
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.
‘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.
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.
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’m open to do a Filipino drama if I like the role or if the plot is attractive to me.
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.
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.
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.
No good opera plot can be sensible, for people do not sing when they are feeling sensible.
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.
There is no better place to plot the death of a character than when you’re miserable and working out.
I write my scripts on a whim, without worrying about plot points and graphs.
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?
Countries across the world are taking action now to help them track paedophiles and terrorists who abuse new technology to plot their horrific crimes.
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 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.
