Siegfried Lenz Quotes

I'll tell you the secret. When you begin with a character, you want to begin by creating a villain.

I've never sat down and thought about the difference between plot and theme. To me, that's never been important.

I don't like plots. I don't know what a plot means. I can't stand the idea of anything that starts in the beginning - you know, 'beginning, middle and end.'

A subplot is a distinguishing characteristic of the novel; the short story, for example, does not need subplots.

Character development is conflict.

Good stories are driven by conflict, tension, and high stakes.

The villain drives the plot.

I think a good story's a good story and a good character's a good character.

Once I have a hook I think has potential - enough to spin out more than a hundred thousand words, then I start turning my attention to characters. Who are these people? Why did this thing happen to them? But the hook always comes first.

The rules I go by are: Always keep your villains bad, and keep the plot grounded and real. If you keep those stakes, the comedy will bounce off that and work.

Anything with a good story and characters I think would be great.

I think too often in films, people think endings are a summation of plot, and I don't like that. Because once you know where you're going as an audience member, then it's like a video game. You're just waiting for them to get through the levels and beat the bad guy. And I just think that's boring.

A compelling story requires conflict, friction, an obstacle to be overcome.

I think screenwriting gave me more of an affinity for plot - my first novel, 'Me and Earl and the Dying Girl,' doesn't have a very sophisticated roadmap. But screenwriting required me to learn a higher level of plottiness, and I tried to bring that to 'The Haters.'

Here's what happens in a play. You get involved in a situation where something is unbalanced. If nothing's unbalanced, there's no reason to have a play. If Hamlet comes home from school, and his dad's not dead and asks him if he's had a good time, it's boring. But if something's unbalanced, it must be returned to order.

I like to tell stories that have beginnings, middles and ends.

Storytelling is about two things; it's about character and plot.

The suspense of a novel is not only in the reader, but in the novelist, who is intensely curious about what will happen to the hero.

Every drama requires a cast. The cast may be so huge, as in Leo Tolstoy's 'Anna Karenina,' that the author or editor provides a list of characters to keep them straight. Or it may be an intimate cast of two.

If I've got one thing that I really believe about fiction and life, it's that there are no minor characters.

An action movie should, like any other, follow the narrative traditions of literature. That means there should be subtlety, a slow build and a gradual bringing together of all the separate threads of the plot. To see all of it coming together slowly is very rewarding for the audience.

I'm first and foremost interested in the story, the characters.

I love good stories; you have to have a good plot - characters which intertwine with a good plot.

I want to tell a story and shape it all the way through to the end.

The beginning of a plot is the prompting of desire.