Edward Hirsch Quotes

Well, if storytelling is important, then your narrative ability, or your ability to put into words or use what someone else has put into words effectively, is important too.

Characters develop as the book progresses, but any that start to bore me end up in the wastepaper basket. In real life, we may have to put up with tedious people, but not in novels.

The more fiction you read and write, the more you'll find your paragraphs forming on their own.

In film, because you know where the ending is, characters can change, but in television, you substitute revelation for change, and that can be hard to pull off.

I love the long-form format of television. I love being able to develop a character, over a long period of time.

Short stories are fiction's R & D department, and failed or less-than-conclusive experiments are not just to be expected but to be hoped for.

One pleasure of working on a trilogy is watching characters warp and grow over time.

I've never written poetry. I'm not a poet, but I think the nearest you get is either the short story or the novella, in that you can't waste a word. There is no hiding place: everything's got to be seen to relate, and the prose counts.

People who actually tell stories, meaning people who write novels and make feature films, don't see themselves as storytellers.

I wrote two plotted books, got some of the fundamentals of storytelling down, then... it's sort of like taking the training wheels off, trying to write a book that's fun in the same way without relying on quite such mechanical or external beats.

Not all series books are sagas. Some are shaped more like beads on a string, separate episodes held together by a set of characters, who may or may not grow and change as the series continues.

I enjoy the writing process and producing; I enjoy seeing an idea come to fruition. I'm driven by very complex characters. You look at the pilot of 'Breaking Bad,' where there's so much depth to the character, you can't help but be invested when you watch.

After a while, the character sort of took over.

A novel wouldn't be a book if there weren't some flights of fancy on the part of the author, stopping time to examine things, or to tell a joke.

It means that no matter what you write, be it a biography, an autobiography, a detective novel, or a conversation on the street, it all becomes fiction as soon as you write it down.

I think the ultimate thing in some ways for any writer is to work on a character who's going to have a life for a long time.

In journalism, a fact is just a fact. But in fiction, you have to build your case. It has to be made, step by step.

You want to suggest something new, but at the same time, resolve the drama of the action in the novel.

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.

With a series, you build the character as you go. When you've got a shorter project or a film, you know the overall arc from the beginning.

Every moment of a science fiction story must represent the triumph of writing over world-building.

I'm actually quite critical of the storytelling theme. I think all the storytellers are not storytellers.

Sometimes, in certain stories, I think we know at the outset essentially what the tone is going to be, or it becomes important that we're groping toward some kind of story with a certain kind of tone that we both get somehow. But I don't think how that's combined with other elements is ever in any way overtly discussed.

I don't know if it's good or bad, but when I first started writing I imitated the narrative thrust of a movie. And as I worked, I learned what you can do in fiction that you can't do in movies, and vice-versa.

For me, one thing I love is having an arc for a character.