Adam Rapp Quotes

The thing with film and theater is that you always know the story so you can play certain cues in each scene with the knowledge that you know where the story's going to end and how it's going to go. But on television nobody knows what's going to happen, even the writers.

On a TV show, you don't know where the character is going.

I like the idea of shows where I don't know where I'll be at the end of the season.

In TV, you're always confused because you legitimately don't know what you're doing the next week.

I've always said I'm less interested in twists as I am about escalation.

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

Always in my books, I like to throw that rogue element into a stable situation and then see what happens.

What resonates with me whenever I watch a great movie or TV show is the balance of inevitability and unpredictability. And it's a very delicate balance.

In a great horror movie, you've gotta have some character development and you've gotta set some of your people up and you've gotta have a little back story going. You've gotta take that time for exposition.

Roughly, the action of a character should be unpredictable before it has been shown, inevitable when it has been shown. In the first half of a novel, the unpredictability should be the more striking. In the second half, the inevitability should be the more striking.

Anyone can write five people trapped in a snowstorm. The question is how you get them into the snowstorm. It's hard to write a good play because it's hard to structure a plot. If you can think of it off the top of your head, so can the audience. To think of a plot that is, as Aristotle says, surprising and yet inevitable, is a lot, lot, lot of work.

Really good books need a chaos element: something weird or inexplicable.

With a novel, there is no hurrying it. You're constantly walking into the unknown.

In a novel you have to resist the urge to tell everything.

Fiction demands structures and recognizable shapes. Big surprises only draw attention to the writer's hand.

I always say that, for me, writing a book is like a wacky Greyhound bus trip - I know where I'm starting and where I'll end up, but I have no idea what will happen along the way.

I never know how a novel is going to end, because you don't really know what's going to be at the bottom of a novel until you excavate it.

The most difficult part of any crime novel is the plotting. It all begins simply enough, but soon you're dealing with a multitude of linked characters, strands, themes and red herrings - and you need to try to control these unruly elements and weave them into a pattern.

The most important aspect of any story, to me, is character.

All fiction relies on the real world in the sense that we all take in the world through our five senses and we accumulate details, consciously or subconsciously. This accumulation of detail can be drawn on when you write fiction.

A novel should be a book of questions, not a book of answers.

I prefer to surprise myself as I'm writing. I'm not interested in it if I already know where it's going. So I have only the most general sense of what I'm doing when I start a story. I sometimes have a destination in mind, but how the story is going to go from Point A to Point Z is something I make up as I go along.

A story to me means a plot where there is some surprise. Because that is how life is - full of surprises.

Characters can be mysterious and you're not really sure which way they might turn at a given point.

I always think I know the way a novel will go. I write maps on oversized art pads like the kind I carried around in college when I was earnest about drawing. I need to have some idea of the shape of the novel, where its headed, so that I can proceed with confidence. But the truth is my characters start doing and saying things I don't expect.