Brad Thor Quotes

For me, one thing I love is having an arc for a character.

In film, because you know where the ending is, characters can change, but in television, you substitute revelation for change, and that can be hard to pull off.

Every film you're commissioned to write is all about an arc; usually, the arc is that the world creates a change in the character, usually for the better. To not have an arc, the messages and ideas in the film became more prominent.

All fiction is about people, unless it's about rabbits pretending to be people. It's all essentially characters in action, which means characters moving through time and changes taking place, and that's what we call 'the plot'.

I love the trilogy form. I like the idea that you can establish a character in book one. And then in the second part, you can take the characters down to their darkest point. And then in the third part, you have total freedom either to give them redemption - or just to kill them.

Characters develop as the book progresses, but any that start to bore me end up in the wastepaper basket. In real life, we may have to put up with tedious people, but not in novels.

You have 22 episodes to start from zero to hero; you can really take a nice, big, long arc. In a film, it's tough to do that - you only have 90 minutes.

The idea behind 'Gloria' was to take a secondary character - the aunt, the mother - and stay with her as she becomes our protagonist.

I usually have a sense of where my characters are personally and ways in which they might transform throughout the novel. But I never know at the outset how the book will end, nor do I ever stick to my original plan.

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

I think what good television does well is that it shows characters evolving.

I've often said the reader knows every bit as much about Thorne as I do. When I created him for 'Sleepyhead,' I was determined he should be a character who would develop, book by book, change and grow as we all do, and who - crucially - would be unpredictable.

One pleasure of working on a trilogy is watching characters warp and grow over time.

I can never kind of fathom a character's journey beyond the moment when you go to black, any more than when people ask me what Jason Patric did with the tape recorder at the end of 'Narc,' you know what I mean? Even in 'Blood, Guts,' like, what happens down the road with these characters?

My books usually end where they began. I try to bring characters back to a point that is familiar but different because of the growth that they have gone through.

The thing that intrigued me about 'Breaking Bad' from day one was the idea of taking a character and transforming him.

At the heart of every story is conflict - whether external or internal, make it a good one, and remember that this problem is going to shape your character, leaving her forever changed.

I tend to relate to a character in terms of the arc: what's interesting is where he starts versus where he ends up.

In the writers' room, when we talk about each episode, we first talk about the character journey of the episode.

I'm trying to make all the characters change and grow, or regress.

In TV, you may think your character's one thing for two episodes, and then the third episode it could be something different.

In the end, my reasons for moving down the timeline and introducing a new cast have more to do with keeping myself entertained, on the assumption that if I get bored, my readers are going to be even more bored.

Plot makes the character just as history makes the man.

Novels demand a certain complexity of narrative and scope, so it's necessary for the characters to change.

One thing George R. R. Martin does is surprising things to main characters. But he says so himself.