Sarah Michelle Gellar Quotes

First-person narrators is the way I know how to write a book with the greatest power and chance of artistic success.

I do like putting scenario and story first, and I actually like masking whatever I want to say in the guise of genre.

The fun thing about doing origin stories is you are introducing the audience to characters.

Since I grew up, I have never deliberately used any technique at all other than the physical shaping of my tale so that it more or less resembles what has been thought of as a novel for these last two hundred years.

As a writer, one of the things we all learned from the movies was a kind of compression that didn't exist before people were used to watching films. For instance, if you wanted to write a flashback in a novel, you once had to really contextualize it a lot, to set it up. Now, readers know exactly what you're doing. Close-ups, too.

I've enjoyed working on the TV series that I've worked on, in particular something like 'The Wire,' where there was so much time to tell the story and develop a character. I learned from that that it's best not to lay all your cards on the table straight away.

I spent ages figuring out things like viewpoint, how you tell the story, and so on.

I tend not to know what the plot is or the story is or even the theme. Those things come later, for me.

This means keeping many trails open at once, inevitably requiring a fairly 'parallel' plot. This plot should be discovered rather than announced, so show, don't tell.

My fiction-writing DNA shows in how I think about prose, how I think about the page, how I think nonfiction stories should work. And every piece of nonfiction I write, I want it to have fictional texture.

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

I learned to write fiction the way I learned to read fiction - by skipping the parts that bored me.

What I have in advance are people I want to write about and a problem or problems that I see those people encountering and that I want to explore - it all proceeds sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, and scene by scene.

I'll tell you the secret. When you begin with a character, you want to begin by creating a villain.

I've always enjoyed that kind of thing - thinking about the production of narrative and why it is that when we read a novel, we don't notice the fact that someone who might be very close-mouthed or tight-lipped is perfectly willing to tell us a story in 600 or 700 pages.

Once I have a hook I think has potential - enough to spin out more than a hundred thousand words, then I start turning my attention to characters. Who are these people? Why did this thing happen to them? But the hook always comes first.

I want to present interesting stories that don't qualify themselves just by virtue of their ethnographic type.

'The Last Of Us,' to me, is just amazing storytelling, because everything's from the character point of view, which even movies don't really do successfully a lot of the time.

This basic thing I always do: 'What happened between the character's birth, and page one of the script?' Anything that's not in the story, I'll fill in the blanks.

My stories are character driven.

Use plot to buttress a story.

In judging other people's work, particularly short stories, I have noticed how novice writers tell the readers everything about their characters in the first paragraphs, disclose their motives, reveal their recent activities and their future intentions.

If your reader has been given a rousing opening, he will usually then sit still for at least some exposition. But be sure to follow that chunk of telling with one or more dramatized scenes. That's much more effective than being given section after section of telling.

I'm not first and foremost interested in story and the what-happens, but I'm interested in who's telling it and how they're telling it and the effects of whatever happened on the characters and the people.

Every stage of filmmaking's important while you're doing it, so I spend most of my time figuring out how to tell the story. I have all these stories and ideas, but it's how to tell the story.