Andy Muschietti Quotes

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'm not much of a plotter. I start off with an inciting incident, and in classic crime fiction what happens is that all the action flows from that incident. It's very comfy when it all ties up and feels like a complete universe, but my stuff doesn't always work that way.

With a film, you have to pare down and take stuff out and squish it all down into a 110 page script.

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.

If a novelist has created vivid characters, interesting relationships, settings the reader can easily imagine, and intriguing stories, a screenwriter has loads to work with. The challenge comes with deciding what to cut and what to keep.

Certainly it's very difficult to keep momentum going through a film which has as many characters as this does, and the piece took on a life of its own to try and shape it. That took all the time we had in editing.

You can have the greatest characters in the world and write beautifully, but if nothing's happening, the story falls on its face pretty quickly.

I try to naturally keep things to a manageable storytelling length, which is about two hours, so you try to cut out anything extraneous.

I would say what you have to do as a screenwriter is strip the book back to find the skeleton. When you've found the skeleton - that's what you trust - you reclothe.

A novel requires a certain kind of world-building and also a certain kind of closure, ultimately. Whereas with a short story you have this sense that there are hinges that the reader doesn't see.

The second draft is on yellow paper, that's when I work on characterizations. The third is pink, I work on story motivations. Then blue, that's where I cut, cut, cut.

Plot is what happens in your story. Every story needs structure, just as every body needs a skeleton. It is how you 'flesh out and clothe' your structure that makes each story unique.

I think that three-act fundamentalism in film culture is a problem sometimes, because it's almost too obvious, or it's too expected. And it's not the only way to fill two hours, or to phrase things, or to order thoughts, or order ideas.

When you think of a great twist or a red herring or a way of misdirecting the reader, it is good, but you know that they are just tricks at the end of the day, and the way to keep interest is to write characters that people care about.

Everything you've ever read of mine is first-draft. This is one of the peculiarities of the comics field. By the time you're working on chapter three of your masterwork, chapter one is already in print. You can't go back and suddenly decide to make this character a woman, or have this one fall out of a window.

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.

And that's why any of my picture books exist: They all seem to be built backwards from a simple, emotionally optimistic story beat.

In a crime novel, if you are going to have a big revelation in chapter 30, you have to plant the information in chapters three and 11.

We set ourselves a limit and cut characters which weren't so vital.

Unless the story line carries the scenes, the scenes don't really mean anything.

I love that there's a beginning, middle and end to a film and you can craft what the whole journey is going to look like.

I was at first but I mean I thought at first that I wanted a little bit of that in there but the reasoning behind what they cut and what they kept really makes sense and it really played for me when I saw it yesterday, it all worked and was understood.

If you get a book which is 600 pages, you have to reduce it to a script of 100 pages. In two hours of film, you cannot possibly include all the characters.

Once I've discovered the story, I might restructure it, maybe move things around, set up a clue that something is going to happen later, but that happens much later in an editorial capacity.

My conception of it was that in a normal film you have a story with different movements that program, develop, go a little bit off the trunk, come back, and end.