Emily Deschanel Quotes

There is a natural progression to 'Lost,' and as the story goes forward, it's going to change. It's not a static story. The franchise of 'Lost' is not characters sitting on a beach.

I think we dip in and out of it. Every new show is trying to find their feet before they can say what they are. That's certainly something that I like about the role - going in and out of the personal life. There are some episodes where we go into it a little more, and some where we don't at all

With a film, things constantly have to go up in the story, and you're constantly putting pressure on the main character. It allows to go really deep into what its relationship is.

Don't put your characters on a treadmill. They need to go new places, face new challenges and do new things.

Main characters should grow and change during the course of a story.

For me, one thing I love is having an arc for a character. I love being able to see a character go through something and to learn.

That's kind of my ideal sequel - a movie that continues the story, takes one character and moves on, and moves forward with that character that survived with the first one.

I think love is a great catalyst for many characters to further the story or their own growth.

I don't think plot as a plot means much today. I'd say that everybody has seen every plot twenty times. What they haven't seen is characters and their relation to one another. I don't worry much about plot anymore.

When I'm writing a script, I don't worry about plot as much as I do about people. I get to know the main characters - what they need, what they want, what they should do. That's what gets the story going. You can't just have action, you've got to find out what the characters want. And then they must grow, they must go somewhere.

I love sentences. I love characters. But most of all, perhaps, I love to work on plot, and that may be where my natural gifts lie, if I have any. I like to think hard about plots in TV shows and films.

Roughly, the action of a character should be unpredictable before it has been shown, inevitable when it has been shown. In the first half of a novel, the unpredictability should be the more striking. In the second half, the inevitability should be the more striking.

The character can never be static from book to book. People might think you just come up with a new plot and stick this guy in. Well, he has to be as new as the plot every time.

The reader wants to see something happen between pages one and four hundred, and nothing happens if the characters don't change.

You're always choosing the start point and the end point. And almost by definition, the most interesting period is where something happens, as a result of which something is different at the end. And so to me, the idea that you know everything about a character at the beginning is sort of ridiculous. Something has to be revealed. I like it when the deeper you go with the character, the more you see the layers start to peel away. It's more challenging to me, but it's also just interesting. Those are the things I like to watch. I like to watch the evolutions of something.

As a writer you see the big picture and how you can tell as one character, how your storyline is going to meet up with all these other storylines. And as an actor you're thinking of all the minutiae, all the very small details.

Any plot you impose on your characters will be onomatopoetic: PLOT. I say don't worry about plot. Worry about the characters. Let what they say or do reveal who they are, and be involved in their lives, and keep asking yourself, Now what happens? The development of relationship creates plot.

I don't believe, in a show like ours, that you really want to see character growth. That's just my opinion. Maybe to a small degree, but nothing serious. To that end, it doesn't have the same importance that it would have, if you were on an hour-long show. I think an audience gets really hungry for a character to grow and change on an hour-long show, and I think I would be more antsy.

What is absolutely true is that any good [Television] series has a specific voice. And I think that voice is almost exclusively the domain of the executive producer. . . . As a staff writer you're not being called upon to be the great creative person. You're sort of called upon to understand the characters and their voices and put them through certain paces.

If there is no possibility for change in a character, we have no interest in him.

I think the writers give us different people to work with, different situation scenarios to be in and there's always that fun balance of, you know, trying to keep it light and, you know, light-hearted and put in the comedy while trying to make it into drama.

Anyone can write five people trapped in a snowstorm. The question is how you get them into the snowstorm. It's hard to write a good play because it's hard to structure a plot. If you can think of it off the top of your head, so can the audience. To think of a plot that is, as Aristotle says, surprising and yet inevitable, is a lot, lot, lot of work.

Characters make their own plot. The dimensions of the characters determine the action of the novel.

I suspect that the theme, the nature of the characters, and the method of getting from the beginning of the play to the end is already established in the unconscious.

Every sentence must do one of two things-reveal character or advance the action.