Anne Rice Quotes

Plots may be simple or complex, but suspense, and climactic progress from one incident to another, are essential. Every incident in a fictional work should have some bearing on the climax or denouement, and any denouement which is not the inevitable result of the preceding incidents is awkward and unliterary.

Good stories are driven by conflict, tension, and high stakes.

I better make the plot good. I wanted to make it grip people on the first page and have a big turning point in the middle, as there is, and construct the whole thing like a roller coaster ride.

Plot is what happens in your story. Every story needs structure, just as every body needs a skeleton. It is how you 'flesh out and clothe' your structure that makes each story unique.

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

With a mini series you can give the story a proper sense of pacing, a proper sense of closure.

An action movie should, like any other, follow the narrative traditions of literature. That means there should be subtlety, a slow build and a gradual bringing together of all the separate threads of the plot. To see all of it coming together slowly is very rewarding for the audience.

The beginning of a plot is the prompting of desire.

I hate plots.

I love the idea of stories being about great beginnings and terrible endings.

The only thing I knew about novels from a technical point of view was that they should have conflict.

Here's what happens in a play. You get involved in a situation where something is unbalanced. If nothing's unbalanced, there's no reason to have a play. If Hamlet comes home from school, and his dad's not dead and asks him if he's had a good time, it's boring. But if something's unbalanced, it must be returned to order.

The suspense of a novel is not only in the reader, but in the novelist, who is intensely curious about what will happen to the hero.

You have an hour and a half or two hours - maybe two and a half hours - in a movie, and it has to be a self-contained three-act structure. It's like a rock and roll song. Certain things have to happen for it to be a toe-tapper and get people excited, leaving the theater.

Characters who are on screen from start to finish are not necessarily the ones who have the greatest impact.

A film with an untidy plot cannot grip the audience and define their emotional response.

As a writer, I try to appeal to the 'elusive boy audience' the same way I try to appeal to everyone: I do the very best I can to create interesting characters, addictive plots, tons of conflict, believable settings, unexpected plot twists, intriguing beginnings, and satisfying endings.

Think 'Game of Thrones.' In the old days, this sort of show might be considered bad writing. It doesn't really seem to be moving toward a crisis or climax, it has no true protagonist, and it's structured less like a TV show or a movie than a soap opera.

I love good stories; you have to have a good plot - characters which intertwine with a good plot.

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

If you have a beautiful story, it has to have conflict. If you don't have conflict, it can't be a good story.

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.

In each scene, the writer sets up a situation, which brings a conflict as well as either a small victory or a loss at the close of that particular scene.

Certainly, 3rd acts of any movie are hard. It's always hard to have something that will give you the promises from the beginning of the movie. That's true for all movies.

Tension is the cornerstone of any good story.