Matt Groening Quotes

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.

I have to have a character worth caring about. I tend not to start writing books about people I don't have a lot of sympathy for because I'm just going to be with them too long.

In the end, my reasons for moving down the timeline and introducing a new cast have more to do with keeping myself entertained, on the assumption that if I get bored, my readers are going to be even more bored.

One of the reasons I started working at 'South Park,' actually, was that I wanted to learn how to structure things and how to tell a story.

Keep everything in context, and try to have each line doing more than one thing - not just giving exposition but also revealing character and history, etc.

Writing a story or a novel is one way of discovering sequence in experience, of stumbling upon cause and effect in the happenings of a writer's own life.

So much emotion goes into writing fiction.

To combine telling an interesting story with brilliantly written characters is the most difficult thing to do.

The second draft is on yellow paper, that's when I work on characterizations. The third is pink, I work on story motivations. Then blue, that's where I cut, cut, cut.

When I started to write, I realised that you need a bit of both: the overall context as well as the individual's experience.

How I work is I work from of very character-driven place. And I trust the writers.

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'.

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.

You can really help support a character if you understand the setting. So for that reason I generally write about Philadelphia.

I prefer to bring these to the service of story rather than to let them replace narrative.

Only in very rare circumstances will you see something cut out of my first drafts. Maybe it's because of the way I write. I'm very focused on the logical progression of the story, and every character has a role to play.

Whichever character I'm using and wherever I am in my mind dictates what kind of story I'm going to tell.

You can throw a novel into focus with one overheard line.

I went to a seminar early in my career on the craft of storytelling by Robert McKee. It was really life altering. There are basic principles on how to craft an engaging story and he covers them well. He's got a book out, 'Story,' that I would highly recommend to anyone interested in improve their storytelling.

Writing a novel is actually searching for victims. As I write I keep looking for casualties. The stories uncover the casualties.

That's the way it happens - some characters you set out to use, some are happy accidents. As long as it works, it doesn't really matter how you got them.

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.

There's this thing in TV that I find hysterical where the writers and creators will ask us if you want to know what happens to your character or if you want to experience it episode by episode. In the theatre, we always know the ending; we always know where the character is going.

I read stories aloud at every stage. I listen to my writer friends when they kindly offer criticism. I listen to my husband when he tells me something doesn't seem right. I have my mother's boyfriend, Loring Janes, read to make sure I get everything right with the machines and guns.

I don't always write in order, so composing multi-book stories could get complicated.