A Quote by Max Apple
A volume of stories, bereft of continuity in plot and character, is often unified only by the writer's obsessiveness.
Related Quotes
My key interest in choosing scripts is character-driven stories, because there are so many stories that sacrifice character for plot.
I detest the word plot. I never, never think of plot. 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.
The writer must always leave room for the characters to grow and change. If you move your characters from plot point to plot point, like painting by the numbers, they often remain stick figures. They will never take on a life of their own. The most exciting thing is when you find a character doing something surprising or unplanned. Like a character saying to me: ‘Hey, Richard, you may think I work for you, but I don’t. I’m my own person.’
The second volume of Reiner Stach's epic biography of Franz Kafka . . . [is] a tangle of counter-grained and often under-sourced life stories, but reading Stach's magnificent narrative (wonderfully translated by Shelley Frisch) straight through brings death, not life, to the forefront. Stach is a compulsively readable writer. . . . [A]s in the previous volume, the prose in The Years of Insight is supple and very appealingly complex--all of which, once again, is perfectly rendered by Frisch.
There is only one thing a writer can write about: what is in front of his senses at the moment of writing... I am a recording instrument... I do not presume to impose "story" "plot" "continuity"... Insofar as I succeed in Direct recording of certain areas of psychic process I may have limited function... I am not an entertainer.
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.
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.
I write these shows one joke at a time. There's no continuity. I do try to figure an order to the stories, but there's not continuity.
The earliest influence on me was the movies of the thirties when I was growing up. Those were stories. If you look at them now, you see the development of character and the twists of plot; but essentially they told stories. My mother didn't go to the movies because of a religious promise she made early in her life, and I used to go to movies and come home and tell her the plots of those old Warner Brothers/James Cagney movies, the old romantic love stories. Through these movies that had real characters, I absorbed drama, sense of pacing, and plot.
For I often please myself with the fancy, now that I may have saved from oblivion the only striking passage in a whole volume, and now that I may have attracted notice to a writer undeservedly forgotten.
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.
Fiction writers come up with some interesting metaphors when speaking of plot. Some say the plot is the highway and the characters are the automobiles. Others talk about stories that are "plot-driven," as if the plot were neither the highway nor the automobile, but the chauffeur. Others seem to have plot phobia and say they never plot. Still others turn up their noses at the very notion, as if there's something artificial, fraudulent, contrived.
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.
Plot is very important to me, but I think my stories are stronger in character development.
Writing 'Deadpool' can be a lot of fun. When I first started working with the character, I wasn't sure I'd like him. I quickly realized, though, that a writer can do pretty much anything with him - comedic stories, serious stories, completely nonsensical stories.
Canadians are fond of darker stories, serious stories, so if you're a Mystery writer or a Romance writer or Fantasy Writer, you will most likely have an American publisher and agent.
Related Authors
Charles Bukowski Quotes
American
Novelist
Charles Dickens Quotes
English
Novelist
Chuck Palahniuk Quotes
American
Novelist
Ernest Hemingway Quotes
American
Novelist
George Eliot Quotes
British
Novelist
George Orwell Quotes
British
Novelist
George R. R. Martin Quotes
American
Novelist
Jane Austen Quotes
British
Novelist
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Quotes
German
Novelist
Margaret Atwood Quotes
Canadian
Novelist
Nicholas Sparks Quotes
American
Novelist
Paulo Coelho Quotes
Brazilian
Novelist
Sarah Dessen Quotes
American
Novelist
Stephenie Meyer Quotes
American
Novelist
Veronica Roth Quotes
American
Novelist
Victor Hugo Quotes
French
Novelist