Xavier Dolan Quotes

I started as a playwright. Any sort of scriptwriting you do helps you hone your story. You have the same demands of creating a plot, developing relatable characters and keeping your audience invested in your story. My books are basically structured like three-act plays.

It's nice to know when you're a part of a story, it's nice to know at least something about the beginning, middle, and end.

It's always good to have a story arch.

In a story, you have to have a theme and an angle, you have to have a beginning, middle and an end. You have to have a defining moment and kick it to death. You gotta be able to recognize that, by the way. It probably takes experience.

I care about narrative structure; I care about how stories unfold.

Plot is what happens in your story. Every story needs structure, just as every body needs a skeleton. It is how you 'flesh out and clothe' your structure that makes each story unique.

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

There is no other way of writing a novel than to begin at the beginning at to continue to the end.

Unless the story line carries the scenes, the scenes don't really mean anything.

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.

Marc Cherry is so good at writing himself into a corner, then writing himself out of that corner. It's really fun to watch that.

I have a plot, but not much happens.

The key is a good story. If you have a good story, you have enough emotional beats that you can hit.

A story really isn't truly a story until it reaches its climax and conclusion.

In the writing of novels, there is the problem of how to shape a narrative.

Narrative is linear, but action has breadth and depth as well as height and is solid.

That is what I define as a novel: something that has a beginning, a middle and an end, with characters and a plot that sustain interest from the first sentence to the last. But that is not what I do at all.

The point about a great story is that it's got a beginning, a middle and end.

I like shape very much. A novel has to have shape, and life doesn't have any.

Above all, a well-imagined story is organized around extraordinary human behaviors and unexpected and startling events, which help illuminate the commonplace and the ordinary.

You can read a dozen different textbooks or how-to manuals that will tell you the basic rules of what makes a story - a beginning, a middle, and an end.

I love the idea of stories being about great beginnings and terrible endings.

It's a cliche, and in a way it's a conservative idea about fiction, but I did learn the hard way that plot does need to dictate the story.

I almost write to formula, because there's a historical beginning, then the plots get convoluted.

It's always easiest for me as a writer if I know I have a great ending. It can make everything else work. If you don't have a good ending, it's the hardest things in the world to come up with one. I always loved the ending of 'The Kite Runner,' and the scenes that are most faithful to the book are the last few scenes.