Marc Guggenheim Quotes

Plot makes the character just as history makes the man.

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.

With a series, you build the character as you go. When you've got a shorter project or a film, you know the overall arc from the beginning.

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

For me, one thing I love is having an arc for a character.

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.

Plot and character are virtually the same thing.

My character on 'The Good Wife' is a smaller character, and his story arcs are typically season-long, unless it's a big episode for him. His transitions take place over many, many hours.

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'.

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

My books usually end where they began. I try to bring characters back to a point that is familiar but different because of the growth that they have gone through.

I love the trilogy form. I like the idea that you can establish a character in book one. And then in the second part, you can take the characters down to their darkest point. And then in the third part, you have total freedom either to give them redemption - or just to kill them.

I rarely return to characters. My characters, at least most of them, are much more a part of that superorganism that is the story than separate and independent creatures.

I think it is important that you care about the characters, and you are not just waiting for the next action sequence but have a vested interested in what happens to them.

For me as a storyteller, I want to follow the characters and the story through what they organically demand.

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.

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.

I think action should be revealed through character, so if you have a plot problem, it's probably a character problem.

I'll generally write out every scene that's in the film on a couple of pieces of paper, just with a little one-line. And then I can scan it a bit and go, 'This first third of the film, generally, I'm kind of calm.' Then I might do something on one piece of paper that just relates to the energy of the character.

Although a novel takes place in the larger world, there's always some drive in it that is entirely personal - even if you don't know it while you're doing it.

Filmmaking is always sort of building a mosaic of this arc of what the character is going through.

You have 22 episodes to start from zero to hero; you can really take a nice, big, long arc. In a film, it's tough to do that - you only have 90 minutes.

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.

When I read a script or I see a character, I don't necessarily see the arc of her, that by the end she is this person, she's different from she was in the beginning. I guess it's more a subconscious understanding of that arc.

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.