Zach Braff Quotes

Writing a TV show is totally different than writing features, or just, what I started doing is writing features. You write a little bit more organically. You start from the beginning to the end, beginning, middle and end.

The few times I've tried to write original screenplays, it's a difficult process because I just don't feel like I know the characters the way I know them after the year or two it takes to write a novel.

A lot of times as writers, you want to come up with the best possible story, and you bend it according to what you want to happen. I think one of the things that I always try to think about is what would really happen in a situation, what feels real.

I start with a character and a situation, but I don't know what's going to happen until I write it. Sometimes things happen that surprise me.

We love to start from a real place, whether it's us or our friends or working on a story from a writer's friend.

I've always figured the only way I could finish a book and get a plot was just to keep making it longer and longer until something happens - you know, until it finds its own plot - because you can't outline and then fit the thing into it. I suppose it's a slow way of working.

I like to allow a story to arise as I'm writing scripts. I find it horrible when I try to think of something for the plot without really being on the ground and seeing where it goes.

You learn a lot, writing fiction.

I'm not an outliner. I come up with a premise and then take it from there.

I like to sit down every day and not know where the book is going. I have no idea where the book is going to go or how it's going to end as I'm writing it.

I just focus on getting the first scene right, with a few lines about the overall plot, and then the book grows organically.

When I wrote for TV, I was always thinking in terms of character and story. After fifteen years, it became hard-wired in me.

The minute I ever start thinking about what a character would do is the minute I bring my ego into play. It's the minute I'm putting a judgment on something.

The materials of the novelist must be real; they must be gathered from the field of humanity by his actual observation.

The way that I write novels in particular is I don't usually outline; I just write. Part of the fun is discovering what's happening in the story as I'm going along.

I write sentence to sentence. That's the kind of writer I am. I don't have a plot when I begin. I have to be convinced and I have to be surprised.

You can't improv off of bad writing. Then you have to actually create your objective, which is really hard to do in an element without the skeleton to go off of.

As a writer of fiction, I spend my days inventing real lives for make-believe people; what I create can only seem real.

I tend to plan as I write. And I want to leave myself open and the character open to keep on going until it seems to be the time to stop.

Writing sketches, you're also learning about a journey and characters, and you translate that to bigger things.

I simply don't understand authors that know everything before they write it; it seems so cold blooded. I think it's lovely when the story takes over and goes somewhere else.

Sometimes they keep us in the dark, but it's TV, so sometimes they keep us in the dark because even they don't know yet. You know what I mean? So, it sort of develops as it goes along and according to various needs that arise.

As far as the creative side, the more I do this, the more I know that it's all about the writing. We don't always celebrate that enough, but without the writing, you can't do much. You got on a film sometimes, and it's sort of half-written, and they expect and think that the actor's job is to bring the extra part and the good part. It's not.

The process is different for every book, but there are similarities. I always draw from the inside out. I don't plot them ahead of time, and I'm always surprised by things that happen in my books.

I just kind of like to feel myself into stuff by writing scenes and seeing what characters end up saying.