Nora Ephron Quotes

Ensure that your script is watertight. If it's not on the page, it will never magically appear on the screen.

Really good books need a chaos element: something weird or inexplicable.

I'm a strange kind of author - I like assignments. I wasn't clever enough to invent an iconic figure like Salander, but she's my kind of girl.

Like all writing rules, the injunction to start with the trouble can be broken, and it should be sometimes - if there's good reason.

This is the story, this is your character, I have the sense of the landscape, I have the sense of the scene, I have all that stuff. But I'm also looking for something else to happen, an accident or something. You're focused on the story you intend to tell and then you have to have a peripheral net out to catch these accidents.

To just tell a story from beginning, middle and end doesn't motivate me that much.

We are essentially in the business of telling stories. We would like to think that most of our stories are basically human stories with sports as a backdrop.

I suppose with any good writing and interesting characters, you can have that awfully overused word: a journey.

There are so many projects that you go into hoping the story works, and here comes a new third act and that kind of thing.

Settings are obviously important - and as a writer, you have to respect what was real at the time of the story you're writing. But the real key to success lies in finding the right characters to carry that story.

It's all about letting the story take over.

Marc Cherry is so good at writing himself into a corner, then writing himself out of that corner. It's really fun to watch that.

Good scripts and interesting stories are hard enough to find.

I think that's what fiction writing is actually all about. It's about trying to solve problems in creative ways.

I love the idea of real-life experiences finding their way into fiction. I think that's really cool.

You can't visit readers where you think they are. You have to invite them home to where you are and try to lure them into your universe. That's the art of storytelling.

In a comedy, after the day is done, you can figure out ways of how to make it even funnier for the next day. In dramas, it's very different - the mindset that you're in.

When you're writing a novel - at least the way I write is I work from what I would call 'emotional atmosphere,' ambiance to ambiance.

Anybody can write a film script 'cuz it has been reduced to a formula.

For me, emotion comes first. If I have to change a scene, invent a scene, change dialogue, or put Graff by the lake in order to feel that dynamic, and the end results feels like 'Ender's Game,' then hopefully it works.

But whatever the POV, and the difficulty of forcing the action into a particular frame, stay within it.

So I work hard to present the human side of my characters while not neglecting the plot.

If the right idea comes up, and it feels true to talk about somebody being in a truck, and that's the only way to tell the story, then I will reluctantly tell the story that way.

I used to get stuck trying to find the first sentence of a story, then I realised that it was often because I didn't know what problem a character was facing in the story. As soon as I did, I could have the character trying to do something about it or have the problem whack him between the eyes.

My stories are character driven.