Seth Grahame-Smith Quotes

Whatever the case, oftentimes, for a story to feel complete to me, I need more than one point of view.

I usually give a book 40 pages. If it doesn't grab me by then, adios. With young adult books, you can usually tell by Page 4 if it's worth the time. The author establishes the conflict early, sometimes in the first sentence. The themes of hope, family, friendship and overcoming hardship appeal to most everyone.

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.

In a story, you have to have a theme and an angle, you have to have a beginning, middle and an end. You have to have a defining moment and kick it to death. You gotta be able to recognize that, by the way. It probably takes experience.

What's great about 'Game of Thrones' is they change the perspective, the POV, all the time. So you will have one story told by one character and you'll go, 'Oh my God, horrible', and then maybe the season after you have the same story told but from the person you thought was just the most horrible, vile creature.

As an actor, I think a mistake that any storyteller can make is to play the ending.

Television and film are such streamlined story mediums. You can't really meander about, whereas a novel is an interior experience.

My only conclusion about structure is that nothing works if you don't have interesting characters and a good story to tell.

For me, 'The Hobbit' is an object lesson in storytelling, both in terms of characterization and story structure. It is an exemplar of storytelling in that regard.

I think it's always good not to listen to what the rules are supposed to be about the arc of the character and the third acts and all this stuff.

I think my sensibilities about storytelling and character just automatically come into play when I'm trying to work on any kind of narrative. For me, it doesn't really matter what the source of the narrative is. I will be looking for ways to make it into an intriguing story with empathetic characters.

Something that 'Game of Thrones' always does successfully is that action sequences are never just action sequences. There's always a point of view, and you're always identifying with one person or one group of people.

I think all good short stories are about what it means to tell a good story.

I could make up characters till the cows came home. Plot's what hard. Very hard.

When I was asked to come over to the States, I thought to myself, 'What the Americans are very good at doing is creating stories with strong movement and plots that carry the movie as it goes along.'

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

I don't make unconventional stories; I don't make non-linear stories. I like linear storytelling a lot.

Sometimes, I have themes that interest me or that touch on larger issues but, really, I'm just trying to figure out the plot, or how the characters work. I'm trying to make the best story I possibly can.

I have always argued, in a good novel, interesting things happen to interesting people.

The decision for me was whether to have 'The Father' be a book that told a story - from the point of view of this speaker, the daughter - without, as in the earlier books, then having a section on something else and a section on something else.

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.

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

I find screenplays easy to write, my novels being very visual. You see what people look like. The physical action is described.

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

There are two different forms of storytelling: Novels tend to come from the inside of a character, and movies tend to look at them from the outside in relation to others in their world.