Darin Strauss Quotes

Plot and character are virtually the same thing.

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 all about the story. If I like the character and I think the story's entertaining, I'll do it.

'The Wire' is similar to 'The Walking Dead' in so far as everybody pulling for everybody else to get to the turning point of the story.

I always devise a background so that it makes what your character goes through logical and keeps up the continuity.

I used to get stuck trying to find the first sentence of a story, then I realised that it was often because I didn't know what problem a character was facing in the story. As soon as I did, I could have the character trying to do something about it or have the problem whack him between the eyes.

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.

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

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 books, I will say one thing - they all have a driving narrative, and you have to turn the pages, and the way you do that is to create characters that you really love and care about and put them in a fairly dire situation.

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

I think it's always good not to listen to what the rules are supposed to be about the arc of the character and the third acts and all this stuff.

You can do all of the world-building you want; at the end of the day, what's important is the heart and the drive of the story and the heart and the drive of the characters.

To combine telling an interesting story with brilliantly written characters is the most difficult thing to do.

Fans want to see a story with characters, and they want to see a story.

I like having a plot; I like characters with a reason to get up in the morning.

Whether you're writing a horror show or a James Bond film, I think what bubbles beneath is interesting characterization. The colors that emerge through storytelling is what a dramatist does. There's always got to be something bubbling underneath that will erupt at some point.

In a lot of cases, writers discover that the novel needs to begin later in the action than they'd first thought.

I'm more interested in character than events. I've observed that about myself as a writer. I find events, even the most dramatic sort, not to be such fertile ground.

If we get to shoot the third one, which I'm really hoping we do, the third one's great. There's a big uprising and rebellion, and my character Gale's a big part of that. If we get to shoot that, I'll be very, very pleased.

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

I spent ages figuring out things like viewpoint, how you tell the story, and so on.

Essentially and most simply put, plot is what the characters do to deal with the situation they are in. It is a logical sequence of events that grow from an initial incident that alters the status quo of the characters.

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

A novel, in the end, is a container, a shape which you are trying to pour your story into.