John Updike Quotes

I'm one of those people who think that stories should have a beginning, a middle and an end, and then they're over, and then you tell the next story.

The story always leads you where it's supposed to go.

In a lot of cases, writers discover that the novel needs to begin later in the action than they'd first thought.

I prefer to bring these to the service of story rather than to let them replace narrative.

An author's characters do what he wants them to do.

I spent ages figuring out things like viewpoint, how you tell the story, and so on.

English writing tends to fall into two categories - the big, baggy epic novel or the fairly controlled, tidy novel. For a long time, I was a fan of the big, baggy novel, but there's definitely an advantage to having a little bit more control.

A story really isn't truly a story until it reaches its climax and conclusion.

Some stories don't have a clear beginning, middle and end.

A novel means a new way of doing a story. If you go back the origins of a novel, 'Clarissa' - that's not a novel; it's just a bunch of letters. But it isn't! Because it's organised in a particular way! A novel is what you make of it.

The portal structure is simply a technique: it is neither necessary nor unnecessary, except as the writer and the story make it so. In the case of 'The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant,' it was absolutely necessary to my intentions.

Novelists have to be adept at controlling the flow of information, and, most crucially, they have to be in charge of the narrative.

Your job as a writer is to find storylines, narrative structures, and characters to show the things that you believe rather than saying them or telling them.

'Breaking Bad' and 'The Shield' were planned right from the start so that their narrative trajectory would come down in a blaze of fireworks.

Characters develop as the book progresses, but any that start to bore me end up in the wastepaper basket. In real life, we may have to put up with tedious people, but not in novels.

The last paragraph, in which you tell what the story is about, is almost always best left out.

I don't necessarily believe that stories need closure. I just believe they need a beginning, middle, and end, but the end doesn't have to prevent us from continuing to grapple with the story at hand. It ideally should demand that we remain engaged with the story.

Linear narrative is an artfully-directed telling of a story, where the lighting and the sound is all for a very clear purpose. You're not just wandering around in the world.

I write as if I'm someone reading the book - often people ask if I write one strand first and then go back and seed in the other, but I don't think I could keep track of who knows what, and the tension would come out wrong, so the answer is no - I write it more or less in the order you read it.

Whatever the case, oftentimes, for a story to feel complete to me, I need more than one point of view.

Plot is a literary convention. Story is a force of nature.

He was reading from the beginning so that he could get to the end, where the reader was assured that the knight and the fair maiden lived together happily ever after.

Do not start a story unless you have an ending in mind. You can change the story's ending if you wish, but you should always have a destination.

Someone told me once - I mean I said, "Is it ok that I don't really know what the three-act structure is?" And he said, "It's basically: Act 1: a guy climbs up a tree; Act 2: people come and throw stuff at him; Act 3: he gets down."

To combine telling an interesting story with brilliantly written characters is the most difficult thing to do.