Sarah Weinman Quotes

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'.

We don't experience our lives as plots. If I asked you to tell me what your last week was like, you're not really gonna give me plot. You're gonna give me sort of linked narrative. And I wanted to see how do we bring that into fiction without losing the reader.

Whether it's 'The West Wing' or anything else, my first thought is always, 'What's a good story?'

So much emotion goes into writing fiction.

Plot and character are virtually the same thing.

The problem with themes is that writers don't realise they are themes until someone points them out.

The luxury we have when we do a series is that we go through a long journey, and it keeps a lot of information and things to be revealed.

Since I was there in the very beginning, I know the history of the characters. So, I make comments about the tone and sometimes remind the writers that we've done that before.

I went to a seminar early in my career on the craft of storytelling by Robert McKee. It was really life altering. There are basic principles on how to craft an engaging story and he covers them well. He's got a book out, 'Story,' that I would highly recommend to anyone interested in improve their storytelling.

You cannot base a whole movie on just the imagery alone. It has to be the story and the characters.

People tend to think of their lives as having a dramatic arc, because they read too much fiction.

I think it's a short story writer's duty, as well as writing well about emotions and characters, to write story.

In a film you only get two hours to do this big arc and so you have to pick and choose your moments carefully, but with television you get to take your time and just take it episode by episode and discover new things.

I want to tell a story and shape it all the way through to the end.

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

The truth is, everything ultimately comes down to the relationship between the reader and the writer and the characters. Does or does not a character address moral being in a universal and important way? If it does, then it's literature.

Whenever you can manoeuvre your characters into a situation where they both have a good argument to make, you're on the right track.

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

It's really about, oh come on, this guy wouldn't say that or he wouldn't do that, you know, it's about the characters, about the story, about the situation.

When you have really good writing, you're compelled by the actors who are in it, and you may think it's the actors or the design or the filmmaking of it, but then you're like, 'Well, the base is a really rich story that these guys have created.'

When I work on a novel, I usually have one character and a setting in mind.

Once a novel gets going and I know it is viable, I don't then worry about plot or themes. These things will come in almost automatically because the characters are now pulling the story.

Literary fiction - if we must use the term - is not the plotless, meandering indulgence that its detractors would have you believe.

If you do weave one-liners into a story, you have to have an overall story as well, otherwise it doesn't really count as narrative.

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.