Rachel Cusk Quotes

The first act is the easiest to plot. The second act is always the hardest to plot. Generally a good, you know, sometimes the third act can be difficult because you can get into a rut in the third act - everybody runs to their Corvette, has a chase, and you catch the bad guy.

'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.

The great thing about a trilogy is that it feels like you've got a beginning, a middle, and an end.

I look for two things when I am about to launch into a book. First, there has to be a dramatic arc to the story itself that will carry me, and the reader, from beginning to end. Second, the story has to weave through larger themes that can illuminate the world of the subject.

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.

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

I'm big on story structure. I studied with John Truby, who mapped out story by means of moral wants and needs, and that's what I do. Hey, so does John Irving.

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

As I work, I see my writing - each scene, each chapter, each section, each book - in three-act structures and classic myths, and I analyze them through the handy filter of the detective story.

There is one plot point in one of the 'D'Arnath' books that I don't think I handled as well as I could have. Am I going to tell you which one? No way!

You want to suggest something new, but at the same time, resolve the drama of the action in the novel.

I think stories do have an ending. I think they need to have an ending eventually because that is a story: a beginning, middle and end. If you draw out the end too long, I think storytelling can get tired.

The conventional Aristotelian plot proceeds by means of a protagonist, an antagonist, and a series of events comprising a rising action, climax and denouement.

You don't have to resolve every problem of the book at the end, but you do have to resolve some.

I believe in three-act structure. When I say that to novel people, or people in the world of books, they go, 'Well, that's a film thing.' However, even a good joke has three acts.

The great thing about fiction is you can fix things and make things better.

I just have to let the story go the way it needs to go and let them take the detours they want to take, and I'll get to the end.

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

It's amazing how far you can get into a plot before you figure out what you're doing.

For me, 'The Hobbit' is an object lesson in storytelling, both in terms of characterization and story structure. It is an exemplar of storytelling in that regard.

I think all good short stories are about what it means to tell a good story.

I could make up characters till the cows came home. Plot's what hard. Very hard.

In the English books, the American kids' books, typically, there is a problem, the characters grapple with that problem, and the problem is resolved.

Where are the beginnings, the endings, and most important, the middles?

Have a short story feature two situations, and then let them solve each other.