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.
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 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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
Modernism has a reputation for being a forbidding phenomenon: its visual arts disconcertingly non-representational, its literary efforts devoid of the consolations of plot and character – even its films, it’s argued, fall well short of that true desideratum: entertainment.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Sometimes I’ll feel down and realise it’s because of a depressing plot.
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 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.
What the devil does the plot signify, except to bring in fine things?
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.
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.
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.
Before I start, I trick myself into thinking I know what’s going to happen in the story, but the characters have ideas of their own, and I always go with the character’s choices. Most of the time I discover plot twists and directions that are better than what I originally had planned.
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.
Science fiction is an amazing literature: plot elements that you would think would be completely worn out by now keep changing into surprising new forms.
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.
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.
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.
Language is the ticket to plot and character, after all, because both are built out of language.
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.
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.
What I look for in a script is the plot point and whether they’re strong, obviously, or not, whether the characters are rich or not, and if I can do justice to the character or not. Some movies you look at and the script is so bad that no one can do anything with the script.
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.
Storytelling is about two things; it’s about character and plot.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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 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.’
Life doesn’t come in plot points or setups and payoffs. Life washes over you and passes.
I always have a basic plot outline, but I like to leave some things to be decided while I write.
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 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.
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.
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.
