George R. R. Martin Quotes

It was unpredictable, good storytelling that brought you back each week.

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 suspense of a novel is not only in the reader, but in the novelist, who is intensely curious about what will happen to the hero.

Narrativity presumes a special taste for plot. And this taste for plot was always very present in the Anglo-Saxon countries and that explains their high quality of detective novels.

I'm not much of a plotter. I start off with an inciting incident, and in classic crime fiction what happens is that all the action flows from that incident. It's very comfy when it all ties up and feels like a complete universe, but my stuff doesn't always work that way.

I hate plots.

When you learn about stories in school, you get it backward. You start to think 'Oh, the reason these things are in stories is because a book said I need to put these things in there.' You need a death, as my husband says, and you need a little sidekick with a saying like 'Skivel-dee-doo!'

It has always been something I could do, and it may seem odd that in my case I seem to create an interesting narrative and frustrate the reader's opportunities to follow it at every step.

I guess I would say that most of what I've learned about storytelling derives from novels and short stories. I cannot think of a novel or story, or a novelist or story writer, who thinks in terms of three-act structure.

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

The mystery form was very helpful for me as a beginning writer because mystery novels and suspense novels have a beginning, a middle and an end.

I try to tell a story the way someone would tell you a story in a bar, with the same kind of timing and pacing.

With TV season structures - and I'm a huge TV watcher - you look at shows like 'Breaking Bad,' which is my favorite show of all time, and 'The Sopranos,' which is pretty high up there as well, and there was that thing where, every season, Walter White would go up a level, but there would be a new bad.

There's something to be said for a likable character, but fiction has a way of upending our ordinary standards.

If there are 100 people, I don't anticipate all 100 liking my scenario - but I write it so at least one or two of them will love and get really into that particular story.

People often talk about the characters in books as if they were considering whom to invite to a dinner party. 'Oh, I just hated her - she was so mean.' 'He's a bully; I didn't like how he treated his mother.'

Whether it's Brad Pitt up there, if there's a good moment up there, and you get pulled into the emotion, you're not thinking, 'Oh, that's Brad Pitt. He's an actor, and he's famous.' That's kind of the nature of storytelling, right? You sit around the fire and tell a story, and you can get sucked into that story.

I care about narrative structure; I care about how stories unfold.

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

I think too often in films, people think endings are a summation of plot, and I don't like that. Because once you know where you're going as an audience member, then it's like a video game. You're just waiting for them to get through the levels and beat the bad guy. And I just think that's boring.

In a film, you only have a finite amount of time, and you're so concerned with saying what happened and making it a gripping short story with a satisfying ending.

A lot of times in films, the protagonist is either the leader of the group or the nerd of the group. I've never identified with either of those things.

Eventually, after the hero and heroine, it is the antagonist who comes with the most anticipation in any film.

I look for what responsibility the character has in telling the story. If you remove the role from the story, can you still tell the story properly? And if the answer is no, then I'm interested.

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.