Philippe Falardeau Quotes

I don't ever want to impose something on the story. I want the story to tell me.

It is much easier to be flexible about where a story begins than it ever was for me to change my mind about where and how a story ended.

Without sounding too pretentious, I was sort of a slave to the narrative. When the narrative cracks in, I have to go where it takes me. I had to go to the Bohemian Grove. It was the obvious end to the book.

If I'm practicing making up what the characters will do, it's never good. In fact, when I catch myself doing that, I try to get rid of that section, and try and let them start making the decisions.

When I wrote my first book, 'The Tennis Party', my overriding concern was that I didn't write the autobiographical first novel. I was so, so determined not to write about a 24-year-old journalist. It was going to have male characters, and middle-aged people, so I could say, 'Look, I'm not just writing about my life, I'm a real author.'

The thing with film and theater is that you always know the story so you can play certain cues in each scene with the knowledge that you know where the story's going to end and how it's going to go. But on television nobody knows what's going to happen, even the writers.

It's funny with fiction - once you cut something, it hasn't happened anymore.

Writing a novel was completely awesome because parts of it could suck and I could throw them away. I didn't have to know the ending until I got there.

It's all about letting the story take over.

Watch out, or I'm liable to put you in a story.

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.

Part of the reason I wanted to write a novel was that in fiction I could do something that's difficult to do in real life, which is to dwell on the stark details of the experience without really needing to create that narrative of redemption.

If you're writing a novel, you can afford to see where the spirit takes you, but in terms of structure and engineering with a screenplay, you have to be quite pragmatic; otherwise, it will run away from you.

Being a novelist, you can roam around with a story and indulge yourself.

There are times that you have a plot in your head, but then you find that the characters don't want to do that. When you're looking at the story from the outside, you can create whatever twists and turns you want. But when you're writing, you're inside the characters' heads, and you see that they may be motivated to do something different.

As much as I really like the screenwriting thing, the novel is where the author has so much control.

That's the mistake I made, one of the mistakes, to have wanted a story for myself, whereas life alone is enough.

You just have to go with a good story and a script that you like and people that you like to work with.

When we approached the Man of Action guys, we said, "We're not really interested in what's come before, except in the way that we want to make sure that it feels like it's Marvel's Avengers Assemble. From that point on, this is your cast. Go to it and tell great stories."

I don't ignore continuity, and try my best to stick as closely to the current status quo as possible, but it's not my primary concern when I start a story.

[FBI] philosophy is "Go ahead and make the story you want to make, and hopefully we'll love it." So that's that.

Call on literary convention, and it will gladly tell your story for you.

The story sometimes writes you into a corner.

Why do most of us make such boring choices for the stories of our lives?

I'm not trying to convey a message, I'm just trying to tell a story.