Finn Wolfhard Quotes

The secret at the heart of 'The Memory Keeper's Daughter' is something everybody, except for some of the characters, knows in Chapter 1. Some of the narrative tension comes from that distance between what the readers know and what the characters know.

If you were writing a short ghost story, I would say start very quietly and go, 'One, two, three jump.' Or start with a jump and make it jumpier. But with a long story, it must have rises and falls.

Plan for each episode to be a satisfying experience, but still leave the audience thinking, 'Oh, my God! Now what?'

One of the wonderful things about 'Power' and why fans often say it makes their heart race is it's set up like a horror film because the audience is, like, four or five steps ahead of the characters.

I don't know where the characters are going to go or what's going to happen. I know that something inevitable will happen. I know that they want certain things and they're in a certain room and they smell like this and they look like that. More often than not, an entropy creeps in that strangles me, and then the inevitable happens. I don't know if I have the ability to write an ending like My Fair Lady's, when everyone gets what they want after a few minor conflicts. If I tried to write that it would just be false. Or I'd have someone enter with a machine gun.

The element of the unexpected and the unforeseeable is what gives some of its relish to life and saves us from falling into the mechanical thralldom of the logicians.

Character is plot, plot is character.

A novelist must know what his last chapter is going to say and one way or another work toward that last chapter. ... To me it is utterly basic, yet it seems like it's a great secret.

Typically with HBO shows, the ninth episode often winds up being a big one and when lots of exciting stuff happens. And then the tenth one is the more placid, character-based one.

The best parts of any story to me are the unexpected things.

[Dennis] Etchison would write stories that were just punch lines at the end. You wouldn't realize something horrific was happening until the last paragraph.

I feel that the real drama of life is never center stage, it's always in the wings. It's never with the spotlight on, it's usually something that you don't expect at all.

Even when you think you have your life all mapped out, things happen that shape your destiny in ways you might never even have imagined. The coincidences or little miracles that happen every day of your life are hints that the universe has much bigger plans for you than you ever dreamed of for yourself.

It's the mishaps that make it fun, and brings you the surprise.

You can see a whole book as a series of creating an expectation and then delivering a skew on that expectation so it's not totally satisfied.

I love thrillers. I've never made them, but I would say a really good thriller is my favorite kind of a movie. If I can get a really great thriller, you know.

I think the thing that made this stand out the most was just the fact that there's a lot more character to these characters. We see their back stories and we see their present situations, and that was a lot more interesting than just the regular procedural with four heads standing around a body, spelling it out for you. It's a lot more of a roller coaster ride.

Forget narrative, backstory, characterisation, exposition, all of that. Just make the audience want to know what happens next.

What unlooked-for things do happen, to be sure, in a long life!

There are so few surprises left in life. We've gotten so addicted to knowing. It's the Google generation. We want the answer to everything right now!

Drama, instead of telling us the whole of a man's life, must place him in such a situation, tie such a knot, that when it is untied, the whole man is visible.

The course of life is unpredictable no one can write his autobiography in advance.

We can't say anything, but just remember that, on Fringe, nothing is as it seems. There's always a little more to the story behind the story. He's definitely a large part, going forward. A lot of things will come full circle.

When you go into extra time, we're talking about drama. But when we reach the penalty shootout, it's a tragedy.

Narrative tension is primarily about withholding information.