Jason Aaron Quotes

Plotting is difficult for me, and always has been. I do that before I actually start writing, but I always do characters, and the arc of the story, first... You can't do anything without a story arc. Where is it going to begin, where will it end.

I love seeing a story evolve over several books and watching characters develop.

I can't really write anything without knowing the ending. I don't know how people do that. Even with my superhero stuff, I have to know at least where I want to take the characters and what the ending of my story with them will be. I just can't structure stories or character arcs and stuff without knowing the endpoint.

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

I care about narrative structure; I care about how stories unfold.

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

When I first began to have the initial idea for 'Heartsease,' I just wrote a skeleton story; that is, I started her off as this young, bright 16-year-old and then added the events that occurred and where she and other characters fitted in, even writing 3 different endings, as I was not sure where Mary's story would lead to.

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

There's something really satisfying if you've created a bunch of characters that have withstood 25 episodes.

We start with strong characters and build the movie from there. That not to say we don't struggle with story - that's the most challenging part.

I jump around in the plotting stage, where I basically just make a bulleted list of every damn thing that happens in the entire book.

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

I tend not to know what the plot is or the story is or even the theme. Those things come later, for me.

'Homeland' really is one of those shows where they start to write more or less depending on what's kind of going on in a relationship between characters.

It's not that I ever sat down and outlined a trilogy, but I always have a sense of what size an idea is when I start it.

Some writers can produce marvelous plots without planning it out, but I can't. In particular I need to know the structure of a novel: what's going to happen in each chapter and each scene.

I try to trace the connection between the characters and that way a story or plot emerges.

Although when I start a novel I know how it will begin and end, I like to let the people within the story take me on a journey between those points without having a fixed plan.

I've often wished when I started a book I knew what was going to happen. I talked to writers who write 80-page outlines, and I'm just in awe of that.

As an actor, I think a mistake that any storyteller can make is to play the ending.

I write fast. But it takes me a while to get going. It's very important for me to see my whole plot. I have to see the end first because I like a surprise in the end. Which is why I let characters and plot gestate in my mind.

Well, I must tell you I write the scripts very close to the bone. So I'm writing episode seven now and couldn't tell you what happens in episode eight.

We think we've got great stories and characters that will lend themselves to great standalone experiences, and that's the way we're focusing on it.

One of the reasons I started working at 'South Park,' actually, was that I wanted to learn how to structure things and how to tell a story.