Steven Knight Quotes

It was really fun to start writing movies because you could actually take characters whose voice you enjoy writing in and have actual things happen to them for more than five minutes. It was really fun to thread it together.

My only conclusion about structure is that nothing works if you don't have interesting characters and a good story to tell.

It always comes down to script and characters.

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

Coming from TV and film, rule number one is that you always service the main character first and foremost. If that's not working, you've got nothing.

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.

One of the horribly frustrating things about writing feature films is the rules everyone applies and says, 'You have to do this by the end of the first act and by the end of the second act you must introduce this.' As if there were rules to life or telling a story or the ways things happen, which of course there aren't.

We try to not write stories based on reaction. We try to write them based on character integrity as we understand it and observe it.

Whenever I write for television, I plan the story on whiteboard wallpaper in my office, using a system created by the American writer Dan Harmon. It's remarkably simple: a character wants something; they enter a new world and adapt to it; they get what they want, re-enter the old world and change.

Sometimes, I have themes that interest me or that touch on larger issues but, really, I'm just trying to figure out the plot, or how the characters work. I'm trying to make the best story I possibly can.

A novel is utterly your own creation, a very private process. I think of a novel as a noun and a screenplay as a verb. In a novel, very little needs to happen; you can explore a person's memories and thoughts and fantasies. In a screenplay, it's all action; you must push the story on.

I'm interested in telling the character's story, not my beliefs, political or otherwise.

I suppose with any good writing and interesting characters, you can have that awfully overused word: a journey.

It interests me to imagine characters shifting from one situation and one location to another for whatever the circumstances may be.

I never try to give a message in my books. It's about living with characters long enough to hear their voices and let them tell me the story. Sometimes I would love to have a happy ending, and it doesn't happen because the character or the story leads me in another direction.

The action genre is not always the most synonymous with character development.

Although when I start a novel I know how it will begin and end, I like to let the people within the story take me on a journey between those points without having a fixed plan.

You'd be surprised how hard it is getting the human emotional arc in a script to work. Ultimately a director stands and falls by their ability to do that.

As an actor, I think a mistake that any storyteller can make is to play the ending.

Sometimes I know what my characters are moving away from or toward; more often I just wait and see. For instance, though I knew Sinkler in 'The Trusty' was going for water, I did not know that he would meet a fetching young farm wife until I got him into her front yard.

Some novels present a story form many points of view. Most movies tell only one person's side of the story. Sometime it's easy to use the strongest point of view, or find the character with the most dramatic experience. It depends on which themes the scriptwriter wants to explore.

So I work hard to present the human side of my characters while not neglecting the plot.

I feel like if a film is well-written, then the character's arc is complete. There really is very little room to expand on that afterwards.

The story drove the book. That had a very seminal effect on the way I saw writing and storytelling. If you can set a character in a story that is compelling and has a backbone, you draw people in.

For me, plot always comes out of character, so I had to be sure of my characters.