Darin Strauss Quotes

Good stories are driven by conflict, tension, and high stakes.

If you have a beautiful story, it has to have conflict. If you don't have conflict, it can't be a good story.

A compelling story requires conflict, friction, an obstacle to be overcome.

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.

In order to have a plot, you have to have a conflict, something bad has to happen.

You can have the greatest characters in the world and write beautifully, but if nothing's happening, the story falls on its face pretty quickly.

Here's what happens in a play. You get involved in a situation where something is unbalanced. If nothing's unbalanced, there's no reason to have a play. If Hamlet comes home from school, and his dad's not dead and asks him if he's had a good time, it's boring. But if something's unbalanced, it must be returned to order.

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.

With a mini series you can give the story a proper sense of pacing, a proper sense of closure.

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.

I have a plot, but not much happens.

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

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

If you're gonna start a story, you start from the beginning, right?

The beginning of a plot is the prompting of desire.

Real life is messy, and drama is a shaped version of real life.

Tension is the cornerstone of any good story.

Even if your novel occurs in an unfamiliar setting in which all the customs and surroundings will seem strange to your reader, it's still better to start with action. The reason for this is simple. If the reader wanted an explanation of milieu, he would read nonfiction. He doesn't want information. He wants a story.

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.

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 write largely plot-driven stories.

A novel requires a certain kind of world-building and also a certain kind of closure, ultimately. Whereas with a short story you have this sense that there are hinges that the reader doesn't see.

Judgments and secrets are what make a good novel.

Storytelling is about two things; it's about character and plot.

What makes a story a story is that something changes. Internal, external, small or large, trivial or of earth-shattering importance. Doesn't matter.