Marcus Sakey Quotes

My gut feeling about sequels is that they should be premeditated: You should try to write a trilogy first or at least sketch out a trilogy if you have any faith in your film.

But I'm not a small-literary-novel kind of guy, and once I'd developed the world in the first couple of hundred pages, I felt that there was potential here to go on and write an engaging story set in that world. So that's what I did. This probably ruins things both for the people who want small literary novels and for those who want action-packed epics, but anyway, it's what I wrote.

I love seeing a story evolve over several books and watching characters develop.

I think each book sort of finds its own theme as it goes on. 'Warded Man' was fear. 'Desert Spear' was exploration of the other. 'Daylight War' was relationships. Some of this is intentional, and some of it evolves naturally. The series as a whole is obviously something I have given a lot of thought to, but each book is its own animal as well.

I don't think they knew exactly where they were going with the character, but they lay those stories out ahead of time, so they had some idea where they wanted it to go.

With the 'Hazelwood High' trilogy, I wasn't sure I was writing a trilogy. I would just write one book, then another, and then another, because the young adults who wrote me told me that they wanted to read more.

I don't always write in order, so composing multi-book stories could get complicated.

My advice to aspiring writers of fantasy trilogies or series is that each book needs two main plots. There's the 'big story', the over-arching grand plot of the entire series, and there is the complete-in-itself, one-book plot.

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.

Some writers can produce marvelous plots without planning it out, but I can't. In particular I need to know the structure of a novel: what's going to happen in each chapter and each scene.

It's a real challenge to complete a story arc and end up with a cool punchline in 120 characters.

As long as your storytelling and emotional depth are intact, that's what people will focus on.

'The Names' is planned as a nine-part series. I have a kind of road map: I know the final scene of episode nine. But as to exactly how we get there, what detours or horrible accidents we might have to pass through, I like to keep that a little fluid.

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.

'Glass Sword' has several set piece scenes that I plotted out or visualized before I wrote them, but I always knew they were coming. They anchor bits of the story.

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.

Anyone who's been reading my stuff can see that there's a lot of tracks being laid for future stories.

If you say in the first chapter that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the second or third chapter it absolutely must go off. If it's not going to be fired, it shouldn't be hanging there.

Character is plot, plot is character.

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

I enjoy writing scripts. I can find out what happens. With an outline, I feel like I'm doing an architectural diagram of something.

I don't think there is a single sentence in this whole book [East of Eden] that does not either develop character, carry on the story or provide necessary background.

It's important to know the kind of character that you need to be building up to, throughout the series.

I have a scenario but almost always it's entwined with at least one person to begin with. Then I sort of expand from there and I'm thinking about books novels. I've got these scrolls of paper that I hang up in my office and this is my idea room, my nightmare factory, and I have a big title at the top of the scroll and on the left hand side I have these character sketches on the characters, and then once I figure out who they are I can figure out what they want and once I figure out what they want I'm able to put obstacles in the way of that desire, and that's where plot springs from.

The older I get and the more fiction I write, the more I outline, the more I think about plot before I dive in and plunge too far.