David Barron Quotes

Big stories have lots of angles, and you have to decide what part of that story you want to address.

An attempt to write nothing but characterization will soon bog down; I for one don't want to have somebody tell me about someone else.

All the writing elements are the same. You need to tell a good story... You've got good characters... People think there's some dramatic difference between writing 'Little Bear' and the 'Hunger Games,' and as a writer, for me, there isn't.

I came up with a story and I wrote it.

Before you can write a novel you have to have a number of ideas that come together. One idea is not enough.

A good story cannot be devised; it has to be distilled.

I write and write and write, and then I edit it down to the parts that I think are amusing, or that help the storyline, or I'll write a notebook full of ideas of anecdotes or story points, and then I'll try and arrange them in a way that they would tell a semi-cohesive story.

Ruthless concern with story is what I learned in television.

To provide background and physical description and all the rest is of course vital to fiction, but vital only insofar as such detail is in the service of a richly imagined story, rather than in the service of good botany or good philosophy or good geography.

Technique is of less interest than character and story.

My work as a screenwriter has influenced my fiction. Writing screenplays forces you to consider many elements regarding story structure and other narrative devices that can be used to enhance the infinitely more complex demands of a novel.

Language description and metaphors seem readily available. The things I have to work harder at are plot, pacing, and form.

What a good novelist does with a throwaway that serves no fictional purpose is throw it away.

I like the compressed nature of the story telling.

A lot of directors understand everything but the story.

When I'm writing a story, I try to reduce it to the barest possible components and go from there.

With any movie at all the challenge lies in the storytelling.

The things I discovered when writing 'Line of Duty' were the tools you have available to write a thriller.

If you go wrong in a novel, you can straighten it out in the next chapter. You don't have any room to do that in a novella.

But basically, I'm trying to write a fun story.

I always think plot is what you fall back on if you can't write, to keep things going.

Writing a novel is so hard, and there are so many problems that the last thing you're thinking about is adapting this mess you have on your hands as a movie. You just want to get it to work as a novel. That's your main focus.

The most important aspect of any story, to me, is character.

Unless the story line carries the scenes, the scenes don't really mean anything.

I'm not very good at story. In fact, compared to character and language, I barely care about story at all.