Marina Warner Quotes

The eye searches for shapes. It searches for a beginning, a middle, and an end.

Storytelling is ultimately a creative act of pattern recognition. Through characters, plot and setting, a writer creates places where previously invisible truths become visible. Or the storyteller posits a series of dots that the reader can connect.

I do have that compulsion to organize moments into a larger thing.

Memory depends mainly upon myth. Some even occurs in our minds, in actuality or in fantasy; we form it in memory, molding it like clay day after day - and soon we have made out of that event a myth. We then keep the myth in memory as a guide to future similar situations.

I started writing really early on, and my brother Jordan was my first audience. I would come up with scary stories to tell him at bedtime.

Once you have found the right shot to introduce the scene-written your first declarative sentence-then the rest flows. You've found the key to the whole scene.

If you have a problem with the third act, the real problem is in the first act.

Personally, one of the most helpful things I learned was three-act structure. For my first four or so novels, I built the structure intuitively.

The language in a comic book or a graphic novel and the cinematographic language are really not the same language. They are false brother and sister. It's not at all the same.

The story is the first thing and the last thing.

As for the story, whether the poet takes it ready made or constructs it for himself, he should first sketch its general outline, and then fill in the episodes and amplify in detail.

In Hollywood, writers are considered only the first draft of human beings.

I think one is naturally impressed by anything having a beginning a middle and an ending when one is beginning writing and that it is a natural thing because when one is emerging from adolescence, which is really when one first begins writing one feels that one would not have been one emerging from adolescence if there had not been a beginning and a middle and an ending to anything.

The title is the first thing that I have. Then when I have that title, I have to make sure that the title...is like, so...I have to make sure I can tell a whole story from that one title and like make sure that it, from beginning to end it makes sense.

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

If in the first act you introduce a gun, by the third act you have to use it.

A novel, basically, is writing one sentence — then, without violating the scope of the first one, writing the next sentence.

The script comes first. If that isn't good enough, you know it's gonna be a long ride.

You break the story first, and then you go into the specifics.

The first paragraph. The last paragraph. That's where the story is going and how it's going to end. Or else you'll go off in a hundred different directions.

The situation comes first...the characters...come next...[then] begin to narrate.

I like to read the ending first.

In some ways, a novel isn't as structurally rigorous as a screenplay or a TV show, which have finite real estate. In a novel, you can more deeply illuminate a character's interior and get away with digressions.

The thing I have learned through the years is that one idea 'doth' not a novel make. A novel must be several seemingly unrelated ideas that somehow magically come together to create the fabric of the story.

In a good script, it's really like a treasure map. You just focus on that, all the answers are pretty much in it.