Peter V. Brett Quotes

I don't plot with huge detail, just big moments and important elements, and then I have a structure but can fly by the seat of my pants when I write.

It took me many years to figure out how to structure a compelling story.

My forte is the plotting. You sit down, and you work out a plot.

In a lot of ways, TV writing taught me how to be a good storyteller. I learned about dialogue, scenes, moving the plot forward.

No, you don't have to start your play with a premise. You can start with a character or an incident, or even a simple thought. This thought or incident grows, and the story slowly unfolds itself. You have time to find your premise in the mass of your material later. The important thing is to find it.

I tend not to know what the plot is or the story is or even the theme. Those things come later, for me.

I think I realized very early on that you can spend a lot of time constructing a really perfect scene in final draft and just end up throwing it away because you didn't figure out that mathematics of the story first.

Normally I start with a plot, and write a synopsis, and the ideas come from the construction.

I do novels a bit backward. I look for a situation, a milieu first, and then I wait to see who walks into it.

In the past, I'd been sort of a fan of writing a coat hanger of a script, and something I could hang ideas off of.

You don't idea your way into a plot but plot your way into an idea.

It begins with the kind of story the writers want to tell. We never sit around in those retreats and say, 'We really need to make a change. Let's change this character.' Or throw a dart at the wall and see what hits. It all begins with story.

I don't make unconventional stories; I don't make non-linear stories. I like linear storytelling a lot.

I am not an analytical writer. Once I flesh out my characters and decide on the elements of my plot, the story unfolds in my head almost as though it was a movie reel.

When I first began to have the initial idea for 'Heartsease,' I just wrote a skeleton story; that is, I started her off as this young, bright 16-year-old and then added the events that occurred and where she and other characters fitted in, even writing 3 different endings, as I was not sure where Mary's story would lead to.

Writing a story is pretty all-consuming for me - it feels a lot like method acting, and for the eight or twelve or fifteen months that I'm working on a story, I'm constantly thinking about how my narrator would react to whatever tangled situation I'm in.

Plotting is difficult for me, and always has been. I do that before I actually start writing, but I always do characters, and the arc of the story, first... You can't do anything without a story arc. Where is it going to begin, where will it end.

I'm big on story structure. I studied with John Truby, who mapped out story by means of moral wants and needs, and that's what I do. Hey, so does John Irving.

There are two questions that you ask yourself as a writer, and one of them is, 'But why?' The question that takes the book forward is, 'What if? What if x y or z happened? How would those characters react?'

In order to deliver the emotional truth in the story, you have to include some of the literal truth.

We start with strong characters and build the movie from there. That not to say we don't struggle with story - that's the most challenging part.

I start with a beat sheet, which is more of an abbreviated outline. It hits all the major plot points. From there, I move to note cards. But the most important part of my process is my inspiration board.

If I can tell you the story from beginning to end in five minutes, I'm ready to start writing. Then it's a constant spreading out of that five minutes.

I usually start with an ending, then outline high points of things that happen, and kind of make up the rest as I go along. Occasionally, the characters surprise me, and I wonder how we got here. Other times, the characters are stubborn and won't do something I want them to in the story.

What I have in advance are people I want to write about and a problem or problems that I see those people encountering and that I want to explore - it all proceeds sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, and scene by scene.