Guillermo del Toro Quotes

I think that three-act fundamentalism in film culture is a problem sometimes, because it's almost too obvious, or it's too expected. And it's not the only way to fill two hours, or to phrase things, or to order thoughts, or order ideas.

The thing with film and theater is that you always know the story so you can play certain cues in each scene with the knowledge that you know where the story's going to end and how it's going to go. But on television nobody knows what's going to happen, even the writers.

I started as a playwright. Any sort of scriptwriting you do helps you hone your story. You have the same demands of creating a plot, developing relatable characters and keeping your audience invested in your story. My books are basically structured like three-act plays.

If you don't have a story that will hold the audience, you won't have a successful show.

And I don't want to begin something, I don't want to write that first sentence until all the important connections in the novel are known to me. As if the story has already taken place, and it's my responsibility to put it in the right order to tell it to you.

The great thing about a trilogy is that it feels like you've got a beginning, a middle, and an end.

What frustrates me about some high-concept shows is that they don't give you information until sweeps, but 'Jericho's' audience will get a large piece of the puzzle every week.

On TV, you never know where it's going. They may even lie to you about where it's going. You never really know because the scripts come in every couple of weeks or so.

Well, I must tell you I write the scripts very close to the bone. So I'm writing episode seven now and couldn't tell you what happens in episode eight.

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.

I love the three-act theory. It works and works beautifully. But you don't necessarily have to structure a story that way: Cortazar and Borges wrote in different structural styles.

I believe in three-act structure. When I say that to novel people, or people in the world of books, they go, 'Well, that's a film thing.' However, even a good joke has three acts.

We got kind of into a rhythm at 'Parks' because there were so many characters that we had an A story, a B story, and a C story just about every episode. So by the middle of that show's run, we always had three stories, and it worked really well.

The thing about TV is you kind of have an endless canvas. You can always keep going.

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.

Our story has three parts: a beginning, a middle, and an end. And although this is the way all stories unfold, I still can't believe that ours didn't go on forever.

Stories work, if they have a beginning, middle and end.

For me, 'The Hobbit' is an object lesson in storytelling, both in terms of characterization and story structure. It is an exemplar of storytelling in that regard.

Sometimes if you tell me what a story is about in just a few sentences, I can tell you if it's going to be a success.

I think it's always good not to listen to what the rules are supposed to be about the arc of the character and the third acts and all this stuff.

Ever since I was introduced to Ekta Kapoor, I have learnt a great deal from her storytelling, and the learning continues.

A funny thing about film is that it's the only medium where people say there are really rules that you have to stick to. Nobody says to the writer - in a film you've got to have three acts - there's a character arc you have to do - there's no reason that's true.

As an author, you think you know where the good parts and the bad parts are. And then you read to a group of children, and you learn when you're boring them, and you hurry through those sections to get to the parts where they're interested again. You start to get a sense of your story's rhythm and flow.

There's a reason a happy ending is called an ending. The trick of a television storyteller is to find all the rivers and mountains and valleys on the way to that ending.

I try to construct each of my novels around one central theme - core tensions shared by the characters.