Jonathan Tropper Quotes

If you look closely at 'Breaking Bad' and any given episode of 'The X Files,' you will realise the structure is exactly the same.

I very much use Bill Willingham's approach on 'Fables,' which is that rather than having an end point to a series, I have an end point for the various story lines.

When you tell a story, there are imperatives of structure, of style, of pacing and all of this, that are there simply because you want to make it a good story. When do you introduce your characters? When do you put them onstage, when do you take them off the stage? How do you weave the different threads of the narrative together?

It's the reason I love doing TV - revisiting stories and characters and the length of the story arcs.

I really like scripted dramas. My favorite show of all time would have to be 'Lost': I loved how the writers and producers were able to weave the different storylines together; and the acting in that show was incredible.

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'.

If you create a good story that has a lot of story value... I think audiences like that. It's why they stick with the same TV show over and over.

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.

I've always loved shows that combine both approaches - that have a mythology and a set of characters, whose stories develop and change, and where the relationships evolve and fracture.

In a film you only get two hours to do this big arc and so you have to pick and choose your moments carefully, but with television you get to take your time and just take it episode by episode and discover new things.

These days we're all hyper-aware of the canonical way in which stories are supposed to play out - people are taught all about three-act scripting and where to put the reversal and all of that - and I think we can do more interesting narratives.

Every story has its demands.

We want to take our time with 'Descender' and let the story unfold at its own pace. But we have carefully planned each world and worked to give each its own look and feel. And each of the 9 core worlds will play a role in the series.

I have things planned for every character like what they're doing down the road and coming to different realizations but I don't have how they overlap.

When I first starting conceiving series like 'Courtney,' 'Polly,' 'How Loathsome,' etc., I was shooting for closed story-arcs but open-ended concepts. Then I started realizing I was committing myself to potentially endless series.

The fundamental difficulty that most novelists face when they are trying to adapt their own book into a screenplay is realizing that a screenplay is a completely different way of storytelling, and it has limitations.

Storylines are how characters create the plots involved in their stories.

In a weird way, I think I'm much better at oneshots than longform. So I try to focus on five or six-issue arcs. I have a real fondness for the one-shots because that's where I do my best storytelling.

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.

Television provides the opportunity for an ongoing story - the opportunity to meld the cast and the characters and a world, and to spend more time there.

I'm a firm believer in stories with arcs and beginnings and endings and all that. 'Scott Pilgrim' is sort of one long novel, and it's so long that I get confused and sort of tread water sometimes. But there's definitely a goal to it. People who just dismiss it as shallow, that's their prerogative, but it's not really my intent.

One of the things that I have learned since trying to bring in an interesting story in under 28 pages is that we already agree on great chunks of typical superhero stories.

I never know, when I start writing a story, what's going to happen, or how it will all get sorted out.

TV, particularly network television, gives you a much greater opportunity to tell a long-form story, to develop a character and keep it detailed. Film, by its nature, is more finite.

It's like, in movies where you talk to the audience 90 percent of the time, it's - you kind of want to stay away from that stuff. But, you know - but to write exposition brilliantly is hard.