Trudi Canavan Quotes

I'm going to have to class 'True Detective''s first season with so many other shows that were great until the final episode(s) and then lost their way. I still love this show, but I would have preferred no ending at all to this one.

While most episodes have a beginning, middle, and an ending, finales on 'Game of Thrones' are just one ending after another after another, as each of the storylines needs to wrapped up or at least attended to in some way.

One of the traps or the pitfalls of writing a trilogy - or a triptych, or whatever term you want to use - is that the second book can be a long second act to get you from book one to book three, which borrows all of its energy from the first book.

The nice thing about a series is you can end on cliffhangers all the time. You can be like, 'You know what? Here we go, this person just died, end of book.' And with the end of the series, you're very conscious of all the plotlines that were left hanging. There's a balance there to wrap those up but still leave it exciting.

You don't have to resolve every problem of the book at the end, but you do have to resolve some.

I love a good cliffhanger. I love when big events happen in shows. I love shows that aren't afraid to take risks and to really do what's best for the story line and realistic for the story line.

But then of course you reach a point where you have to say, I've got to figure out how this book's going to end. Otherwise, you're going to write yourself into so many dead-ends.

I wrote Steve Carell's last episode. I think it was a really good episode, but there's always a tension between what's good for the series and what's good for an episode, because the more closure you put on an episode, the more significant feeling it is.

I think that 'The Shield' was a phenomenal series finale.

It's often the case that the most strained moments in books are the very beginning and the very end - the getting in and the getting out. The ending, especially: it's awkward, as if the writer doesn't know when the book is over and nervously says it all again.

I can never kind of fathom a character's journey beyond the moment when you go to black, any more than when people ask me what Jason Patric did with the tape recorder at the end of 'Narc,' you know what I mean? Even in 'Blood, Guts,' like, what happens down the road with these characters?

I love the trilogy form. I like the idea that you can establish a character in book one. And then in the second part, you can take the characters down to their darkest point. And then in the third part, you have total freedom either to give them redemption - or just to kill them.

The great thing about a trilogy is that it feels like you've got a beginning, a middle, and an end.

If you'll think about various series you've read, can you think of any instance in which, say, the tenth volume of the series is notably better than the first nine? I can't.

That's one of the reasons why 'Lost' has to end: because we can't sit around and envision, 'What is the flashback for Jack in year nine?' It doesn't realistically exist.

Certainly, 3rd acts of any movie are hard. It's always hard to have something that will give you the promises from the beginning of the movie. That's true for all movies.

More than working toward the book's climax, I work toward the denouement. As a reader and a writer, that's where I find the real satisfaction.

I think stories do have an ending. I think they need to have an ending eventually because that is a story: a beginning, middle and end. If you draw out the end too long, I think storytelling can get tired.

A brief short story may require only a few paragraphs after the climax. On the other hand, in his massive novel 'The World According to Garp,' John Irving's denouement consisted of 10 separate sections, each devoted to an individual character's fate and each almost a story in itself.

I think predictability is built into any good novel in some way - you begin reading Anna Karenina and you know pretty much what's going to happen at the end. But that doesn't mean you know what's going to happen in the middle. For me, it's that sense of what happens in the middle that's important.

I had an erroneous idea that writing a duology would be simpler than writing a trilogy because I would get to cut out the middle book. It turns out it was actually harder because 'Wildcard' became this combination of having to write a book two and three at the same time.

What's important on a comedy show, or any show, is that some stories have to go somewhere. There have to be ends to the beginnings and middles you create. But sometimes it's like a way station on the highway, then the actual thing doesn't have to be this giant, climactic, life-changing, game-changing thing.

Resolution and conclusion are inherent in a plot-driven narrative.

The mystery form was very helpful for me as a beginning writer because mystery novels and suspense novels have a beginning, a middle and an end.

The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what fiction means.