Stacey D'Erasmo Quotes

I love 'Memory Keeper's Daughter,' but in some ways I think 'The Lake of Dreams' is a stronger book. I was able to tell the story I wanted to tell. That's all you can ever do as a writer. From there on you have no control over it.

Sometimes television can just jump from one bit of plot to the next, and the words fill in the in-between.

I wanted to show those characters discovering it is possible to find common ground, as they make their way through a plotline that I hope is engrossing enough to keep the reader a willing participant.

It's rare that I actually have a story in my head. I have events or 'what's the next move?' Like, Maggie, 'where's she going to go in this story, where's she going to end up?' Then the story has to fill in the in-between, and that comes as I'm starting it.

For me, screenwriting is all about setting characters in motion and as a writer just chasing them. They should tell you what they'll do in any scene you put them in.

Stories need stupid decisions that, at the time, seem absolutely rational and necessary. Without stupid decisions, the world isn't thrown out of balance, and so there's no need for a 'rest of the story' to balance it back.

Before 'Wings' came out, I told a few people that at the end of book one, readers should think Laurel made the right choice. Then, at the end of 'Spells,' they should understand why Laurel made the choice she did.

I think predictability is built into any good novel in some way - you begin reading Anna Karenina and you know pretty much what's going to happen at the end. But that doesn't mean you know what's going to happen in the middle. For me, it's that sense of what happens in the middle that's important.

If action scenes just happen decontextualized, they lose their weight and the viewer can feel they don't make sense and that they wouldn't have happened that way.

Everyone knows what it's like to make the wrong decision for the right reasons. For me, wrong decisions are the heart of drama - a character who's always making the right decisions is boring.

My characters are not thinking about the act breaks. They're thinking about what they need to do to move forward. As long as I focus on that, the story starts to progress. As soon as I think, 'We're 20 pages in, something better blow up,' we're in trouble.

When I was asked to come over to the States, I thought to myself, 'What the Americans are very good at doing is creating stories with strong movement and plots that carry the movie as it goes along.'

I don't think there is a single sentence in this whole book [East of Eden] that does not either develop character, carry on the story or provide necessary background.

I will always need to compromise and make choices - you just have to work hard at making the right choice day by day.

Despite the volatile mixture of family, politics and past misdeeds darkening the present, 'Hardball' doesn't have the sharp tang of the early novels or the expansive reach of more recent series installments.

The narrative shouldn't stop for the song in a musical. The music has to continue the narrative of the storytelling.

I always tell my students that, in fiction, the opening is a clue to the work's DNA: not only what it is, but what it will become, where it will lead you.

My way of deciding whether a film is worth doing is if you can get through it all in the first read.

When you are making a movie, there are a zillion cooks in the kitchen, and you don't always get what you want to do. The story can always go in a different direction than what you would like. You compromise, and there is dealing and bickering.

I think my sensibilities about storytelling and character just automatically come into play when I'm trying to work on any kind of narrative. For me, it doesn't really matter what the source of the narrative is. I will be looking for ways to make it into an intriguing story with empathetic characters.

Imagining what a character will do in a given situation - it's like an equation, and working it out is a marathon rather than a sprint.

You have to make some hard decisions when you're speaker.

When it comes to a character, I make sure that it adds to the plot.

Let the story lead you. If the story needs to be dark, let it go dark. If it's a sweet, good-for-the-world story, that's what it is.

As a writer, you understand how hard it is to build up backstory for characters, so you can have impactful moments. You have to build toward something and then pay it off.