John Crowley Quotes

For me, any story I tackle begins with the human relationships and not the plot.

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.

I don't know quite how a story develops in my head. It is a bit chaotic. If I am working on a series, one of the main characters at least is already in existence as well as some setting and minor characters. Finding the other main character can be a challenge. Sometimes this character already exists in a minor role in another book.

I've always loved shows that combine both approaches - that have a mythology and a set of characters, whose stories develop and change, and where the relationships evolve and fracture.

Every day, I learn something new. I think one of the most exciting things for a writer is to work on a TV show. It's like a novel. You have a really long time to develop and learn about the characters, and you can just really keep digging in deeper, every week.

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

When the characters are really alive before their author, the latter does nothing but follow them in their action, in their words, in the situations which they suggest to him.

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

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.

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.

Stories are great, but at the end of the day, you remember that moment and that moment and that moment. 'The Avengers' had all of this great, giant action, but for all of the clever dialogue, it's the moments.

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.

My stories are character driven.

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.

It's necessary to track characters all the way through an opera. If you're dealing with more than one or two characters, it's very easy to forget that the others have lives of their own that feed into the story.

I tend to write the episodes in the middle of the season, which can be a challenge because you've got to balance all these threads that have begun - and also make sure they will make sense with the overall plan going forward.

I never know, when I start writing a story, what's going to happen, or how it will all get sorted out.

My main problem with fiction is that once my characters get moving, you just have to follow them along and get out of the way of the story, but sometimes they pull me in too many directions, and I need to focus.

I think my sensibilities about storytelling and character just automatically come into play when I'm trying to work on any kind of narrative. For me, it doesn't really matter what the source of the narrative is. I will be looking for ways to make it into an intriguing story with empathetic characters.

If I can be dead honest with you, when I first see the script for a new episode of 'Endeavour,' if anything jars, I say, 'What's this? Has it got a place in our story?' And if it hasn't, it has to go.

Often what happens with the writing is that you know where you want to start and you know where you want to end, but the journey is never quite what you predict because the characters take on a life on their own.

The only way I could finish a book and get a plot was just to keep making it longer until something happens.

Stop trying to write sentences and start trying to write stories.

I think a lot of composers get into trouble just making up a plot and expecting an audience to follow that.