Patrick deWitt Quotes

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

I don't need all that much - I just need to know who my characters are and what kind of jam they're going to get into, and I'll write myself out of their jam.

What I have to outline is action and plot because I'm not particularly good at that.

My characters are not thinking about the act breaks. They're thinking about what they need to do to move forward. As long as I focus on that, the story starts to progress. As soon as I think, 'We're 20 pages in, something better blow up,' we're in trouble.

In the 'Buffy' room, it was never about a plot twist, ever. It was always about, 'Tell the story, tell the characters, complicate their lives, make things get worse,' but we never worked backwards from the plot, and it was always a great lesson.

I don't make unconventional stories; I don't make non-linear stories. I like linear storytelling a lot.

This is the story, this is your character, I have the sense of the landscape, I have the sense of the scene, I have all that stuff. But I'm also looking for something else to happen, an accident or something. You're focused on the story you intend to tell and then you have to have a peripheral net out to catch these accidents.

For me, when I start a novel, I only have a general sense of what I am going to do - usually three or four big scenes or something to which I can really respond emotionally.

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.

It's rare that I actually have a story in my head. I have events or 'what's the next move?' Like, Maggie, 'where's she going to go in this story, where's she going to end up?' Then the story has to fill in the in-between, and that comes as I'm starting it.

I don't start with the characters. I start with the series of events that will provide the conflict and how it can be resolved. Characters are incidental.

It's really about, oh come on, this guy wouldn't say that or he wouldn't do that, you know, it's about the characters, about the story, about the situation.

When you're writing a novel - at least the way I write is I work from what I would call 'emotional atmosphere,' ambiance to ambiance.

Once a novel gets going and I know it is viable, I don't then worry about plot or themes. These things will come in almost automatically because the characters are now pulling the story.

I just reached the point where plot-driven novels don't hold my interest because I don't care about the fate of characters anymore - whether Emily marries Tom or not, that kind of thing.

I think a lot of drama, nowadays, is character-based and development-based, but 'True Blood' is very plot-oriented.

It's a cliche, and in a way it's a conservative idea about fiction, but I did learn the hard way that plot does need to dictate the story.

When I'm plotting out a book, I use a storyboard - I'll have maybe three lines across on the storyboard and just start working through the plot line. I always know where relationships will go and how the book is going to end.

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

To me, action has to come from the plot.

Stories matter to me. I look for a good script, story, and a strong part.

You can do all of the world-building you want; at the end of the day, what's important is the heart and the drive of the story and the heart and the drive of the characters.

Normally my films have a single thread of an emotion, an insight or one single belief, and then I turn the entire story and build it around that.

I'm a stickler for structure. So I tend to make sure I'm hitting certain points in the script and that I'm progressing and moving things along. You know, are the characters keeping the plot moving along? And are they true, and do I know their motivations?

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