Plot Quotes - Page 16

• This element of surprise or mystery the detective element as it is sometimes rather emptily called is of great importance in a plot.

  E. M. Forster

  Elements, Detectives, Mystery

  E. M. Forster (2010). “Aspects of the Novel”, p.132, RosettaBooks

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• My key interest in choosing scripts is character-driven stories, because there are so many stories that sacrifice character for plot.

  Lasse Hallstrom

  Character, Sacrifice, Keys

  "Soft-centred". Interview With David Eimer, www.theguardian.com. February 23, 2001.

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• I am writing to a rhythm and not to a plot.

  Virginia Woolf

  Writing, Rhythm

  Virginia Woolf (2000). “The Waves”, p.5, Wordsworth Editions

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• 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.

  Tom Selleck

  Jobs, Character, Interesting

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• 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.

  Margaret Atwood

  Pages, Woods, Steps

  "Ten rules for writing fiction". www.theguardian.com. February 20, 2010.

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• Three characteristics a work of fiction must possess in order to be successful:
  
  1. It must have a precise and suspenseful plot.
  
  2. The author must feel a passionate urge to write it.
  
  3. He must have the conviction, or at least the illusion, that he is the only one who can handle this particular theme.

  Isaac Bashevis Singer

  Writing, Successful, Order

  Isaac Bashevis Singer, Raphael Soyer (1981). “Lost in America”, Doubleday Books

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• Anthony Ryan is a new fantasy author destined to make his mark on the genre. His debut novel, Blood Song, certainly has it all: great coming of age tale, compelling character, and a fast-paced plot. If his first book is any indication of things to come, then all fantasy readers should rejoice as a new master storyteller has hit the scene.

  Michael J. Sullivan

  Song, Book, Character

  Interview with Fran Friel, amazingstoriesmag.com. March 22, 2013.

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• Knowing Chris Bennett's Writing as I do, I expected Only Superhuman to have an imaginative plot and a compelling superheroine in Emry Blair. What I hadn't expected was for the backstory to make so much sense. Usually science is the first causality of superhero stories, tossed aside with the breezy rationalization: 'Hey, it's comics!' Only Superhuman is, to my knowledge, the first hard science superhero story. And the Story is the better for it.

  Mike W. Barr

  Writing, Knowing, Superhero

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• 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.

  James Franco

  Weed, Two, Guy

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• Show me where Stalin is buried and I'll show you a Communist Plot.

  Edgar Bergen

  Communist, Buried, Show Me

  "Personal Quotes/ Biography". www.imdb.com.

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• 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.

  Craig Ferguson

  Sex, Golf, Worry

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• If the bible were published as fiction, no reviewer would give it a passing grade. There are some vivid scenes and quotable phrases but there's no plot, no structure, a tremendous amount of filler and the characters are painfully one dimensional. Whatever you do, don't read the bible for a moral code. It advocates prejudice, cruelty, superstition and murder. Read it because we need more atheists.

  Penn Jillette

  Atheist, Character, Giving

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• Plot idea: 97% of the world's scientists contrive an environmental crisis, but are exposed by a plucky band of billionaires & oil companies.

  Scott Westerfeld

  Ideas, Oil, Environmental

  Twitter post from Mar 20, 2014

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• 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.

  Graham Nelson

  Mean, Should, Trails

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• 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.

  Nathaniel Hawthorne

  Weed, Flower, Pigs

  Nathaniel Hawthorne (1935). “The Scarlet Letter (Sparklesoup Classics)”, p.24, Sparklesoup LLC

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• In the first few pages, Kundera discusses several abstract historical figures: Robespierre, Nietzsche, Hitler. For Eunice's sake, I wanted him to get to the plot, to introduce actual "living" characters - I recalled this was a love story - and to leave the world of ideas behind. Here we were, two people lying in bed, Eunice's worried head propped on my collarbone, and I wanted us to feel something in common. I wanted this complex language, this surge of intellect, to be processed into love. Isn't that how they used to do it a century ago, people reading poetry to one another?

  Gary Shteyngart

  Love, Lying, Reading

  Gary Shteyngart (2010). “Super Sad True Love Story: A Novel”, p.339, Random House

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• 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.

  Mao Zedong

  Running, Dog, Peace

  Zedong Mao (1972). “Quotations from Chairman Mao Tsetung”, p.69, China Books

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• I was not interested in doing the plot of Oedipus in blackface. I did wonder, what would these people have been like if they hadn't been in that situation?... One could look at Oedipus, or at my character Augustus, as a cynical schemer who did everything because he was hungry for power. But that's just too easy. I'm more interested in how humans can embody conflicting goals and emotions.

  Rita Dove

  Character, Oedipus, People

  "The darker face of the earth". American Theatre, November 1, 1996.

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• I love to play with language; make it do tricks, turn a word inside out to see if it's got a hidden meaning tucked away somewhere, or perhaps find that it's capable of an extra entendre or two. . . . Plotting is nothing I did, or do, naturally. It is the hardest part of the writing process. No matter how many times you plot a script successfully, the next one, representing new and uncharted territory, convinces you that you really don't know how to do it at all.

  Larry Gelbart

  Writing, Play, Two

  "Laughing matters". Book by Larry Gelbart, www.nytimes.com. 1982.

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• 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.

  Richard Greenberg

  Writing, Character, Play

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• Consider: for all the gobbledegook [film studio] executives spout about backstory, all that we, the audience, want to know is what happens next. That's the only thing that's going on. . . . Character is nothing other than action, and character-driven means The plot stinks, and you'd better hope the star is popular enough to open the movie in spite of it.

  David Mamet

  Stars, Character, Mean

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• I usually base my characters on composites of people I know. One trumpet player in SIDE MAN is really a mix of four different guys I knew growing up. Patsy , the waitress, is a mix of about three different people. I like doing it that way. I start with the characters, as opposed to plot, location, or some visual element. I write more by ear than by eye. I always work on the different sound of each character, trying to make sure each has a specific voice and speech pattern, which some writers could care less about.

  Warren Leight

  Growing Up, Eye, Writing

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• I took many notes, more than usual before I sat down and wrote Act One, Scene One. I had perhaps eighty pages of notes. . . . I was so prepared that the script seemed inevitable. It was almost all there. I could almost collate it from my notes. The story line, the rather tenuous plot we have, seemed to work out itself. It was a very helpful way to write, and it wasn't so scary. I wasn't starting with a completely blank page.

  Charles Busch

  Writing, Work Out, Scary

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• 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.

  August Wilson

  Reality, Play, Needs

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• Several devices he has to draw souls to sin, and several plots he has to keep souls from all holy and heavenly services, and several stratagems he has to keep souls in a mourning, staggering, doubting and questioning condition. He has several devices to destroy the great and honorable, the wise and learned, the blind and ignorant, the rich and the poor, the real and the nominal Christians.

  Thomas Brooks

  Christian, Wise, Real

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