Catherine Hardwicke Quotes

Sometimes television can just jump from one bit of plot to the next, and the words fill in the in-between.

What I do is put my characters into situations that are so precarious there is no way to get out. And then I figure how to get them out.

It's always good to have a story arch.

In fiction, it's a big challenge to keep the reader in one place for so long.

You run the risk, whenever you build your story around a central mystery, of either letting it go too long, or revealing it too soon and then taking the wind out of the sails of the narrative.

I think predictability is built into any good novel in some way - you begin reading Anna Karenina and you know pretty much what's going to happen at the end. But that doesn't mean you know what's going to happen in the middle. For me, it's that sense of what happens in the middle that's important.

A good opening and a good ending make for a good film provide they come close together.

When you tell a story, there are imperatives of structure, of style, of pacing and all of this, that are there simply because you want to make it a good story. When do you introduce your characters? When do you put them onstage, when do you take them off the stage? How do you weave the different threads of the narrative together?

A novel requires a certain kind of world-building and also a certain kind of closure, ultimately. Whereas with a short story you have this sense that there are hinges that the reader doesn't see.

As a rule, anyone who can tell a good story can write one, so there really need be no mistake about his qualification; such a man will be careful not to be wearisome, and to keep his point, or his catastrophe, well in hand.

In a lot of cases, writers discover that the novel needs to begin later in the action than they'd first thought.

Fiction demands structures and recognizable shapes. Big surprises only draw attention to the writer's hand.

In a crime novel, if you are going to have a big revelation in chapter 30, you have to plant the information in chapters three and 11.

In particular, I'm drawn to the stories that have big, high concepts and real characters at their heart. And I love where those two worlds meet, and 'Edge of Tomorrow' is the perfect canvas to explore that.

In plotting a book, my goal is to raise the stakes for the characters and, in so doing, keep the reader mesmerized.

A story really isn't truly a story until it reaches its climax and conclusion.

I'm not much of a plotter. I start off with an inciting incident, and in classic crime fiction what happens is that all the action flows from that incident. It's very comfy when it all ties up and feels like a complete universe, but my stuff doesn't always work that way.

Short-story writing requires an exquisite sense of balance. Novelists, frankly, can get away with more. A novel can have a dull spot or two, because the reader has made a different commitment.

We give you characters we'd feel very comfortable judging, and then go: 'Oh yeah? Watch this'.

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

There is one plot point in one of the 'D'Arnath' books that I don't think I handled as well as I could have. Am I going to tell you which one? No way!

In fiction, the reader will make jumps with you. If you can make the reader make that leap with you, it's a thrilling moment for everyone.

My crime novels are highly structured. I never start out with a dead body. I start with an impossible scenario. Opening questions should be mysterious, weird, intriguing, and contain the seeds of the solution. The structure has to be meticulous - I'm a structure freak.

From beginning to end it's about keeping the energy and the intensity of the story and not doing too much and not doing too little, but just enough so people stay interested and stay involved in the characters.

It has always been something I could do, and it may seem odd that in my case I seem to create an interesting narrative and frustrate the reader's opportunities to follow it at every step.