Dean Bakopoulos Quotes

When I wrote for TV, I was always thinking in terms of character and story. After fifteen years, it became hard-wired in me.

What interests me in writing a novel is taking really remote voices, characters, and stories and beginning to create some kind of web.

As fiction writers, we are entertainers.

In workshopping short stories I learned how to get character down, and how to work with ratios of literal to fantastic to make a world that people can believe in even if it's a little wild or out there.

In a lot of ways, TV writing taught me how to be a good storyteller. I learned about dialogue, scenes, moving the plot forward.

I want to be inside Nic Pizzolatto's brain.

Well, for people who want to write best sellers, the best advice I can give is to say that the novel has to engage the reader emotionally.

To write a story, I think you really have to open yourself up to the world.

I advise all my novel students to write in the company of 'Veronica Mars.'

Writing sketches, you're also learning about a journey and characters, and you translate that to bigger things.

My work as a screenwriter has influenced my fiction. Writing screenplays forces you to consider many elements regarding story structure and other narrative devices that can be used to enhance the infinitely more complex demands of a novel.

You have to have a strong idea for a hit movie, a strong core idea that resonates emotionally. It also has to technically achieve its goal - it's got to be well-written, well-paced, and interestingly told.

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.

A ten- or twelve-page story seems too easy, which is a funny thing to say considering that writing a decent short story is devastatingly difficult. Yet it still seems easier than a novel. You can turn a short story on a single good line - ten pages of decent writing and one good moment.

I was an actor for a little bit. That's when I started to understand fiction - and that one of the great things about fiction is that you're dependent on the characters as much as they're dependent on you.

A novel is challenging, because you have more story than you need and you have to select and narrow.

What I look for in a project is whether the storyline excites me.

When you write fiction, you have an ideal reader in your mind who's sort of you but smarter.

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.

You learn a lot, writing fiction.

If I ever wrote a script myself, it would be strongly emotional material.

Certainly 'The Judgment of Paris' was the novel in which I found my own voice.

I don't write tracts, I write novels. I'm not a preacher, I'm a fiction writer.

I always think plot is what you fall back on if you can't write, to keep things going.

The deepest failures any fiction writer is likely to have are failures of not quite comprehending the truth of the story that he or she is telling.