David Macinnis Gill Quotes

Plotting is difficult for me, and always has been. I do that before I actually start writing, but I always do characters, and the arc of the story, first... You can't do anything without a story arc. Where is it going to begin, where will it end.

In order to deliver the emotional truth in the story, you have to include some of the literal truth.

I jump around in the plotting stage, where I basically just make a bulleted list of every damn thing that happens in the entire book.

In a lot of ways, TV writing taught me how to be a good storyteller. I learned about dialogue, scenes, moving the plot forward.

As I work, I see my writing - each scene, each chapter, each section, each book - in three-act structures and classic myths, and I analyze them through the handy filter of the detective story.

My forte is the plotting. You sit down, and you work out a plot.

I don't plot with huge detail, just big moments and important elements, and then I have a structure but can fly by the seat of my pants when I write.

Where are the beginnings, the endings, and most important, the middles?

A novel requires a certain kind of world-building and also a certain kind of closure, ultimately. Whereas with a short story you have this sense that there are hinges that the reader doesn't see.

When I first began to have the initial idea for 'Heartsease,' I just wrote a skeleton story; that is, I started her off as this young, bright 16-year-old and then added the events that occurred and where she and other characters fitted in, even writing 3 different endings, as I was not sure where Mary's story would lead to.

Writing a story is pretty all-consuming for me - it feels a lot like method acting, and for the eight or twelve or fifteen months that I'm working on a story, I'm constantly thinking about how my narrator would react to whatever tangled situation I'm in.

In a lot of cases, writers discover that the novel needs to begin later in the action than they'd first thought.

I'm big on story structure. I studied with John Truby, who mapped out story by means of moral wants and needs, and that's what I do. Hey, so does John Irving.

When I decided to take writing seriously, I did a lot of reading and analyzing of the books I liked, and came up with what I thought were pretty sound plotting and structure basics.

I spent ages figuring out things like viewpoint, how you tell the story, and so on.

No, you don't have to start your play with a premise. You can start with a character or an incident, or even a simple thought. This thought or incident grows, and the story slowly unfolds itself. You have time to find your premise in the mass of your material later. The important thing is to find it.

I start with the history, and I ask myself, 'What are the great turning points? What are the big dramatic scenes that are essential to telling the story?'

What I have in advance are people I want to write about and a problem or problems that I see those people encountering and that I want to explore - it all proceeds sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, and scene by scene.

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.

It took me many years to figure out how to structure a compelling story.

I write fast. But it takes me a while to get going. It's very important for me to see my whole plot. I have to see the end first because I like a surprise in the end. Which is why I let characters and plot gestate in my mind.

A book begins with an image or character or situation that I care about deeply.

There is one plot point in one of the 'D'Arnath' books that I don't think I handled as well as I could have. Am I going to tell you which one? No way!

I can't really write anything without knowing the ending. I don't know how people do that. Even with my superhero stuff, I have to know at least where I want to take the characters and what the ending of my story with them will be. I just can't structure stories or character arcs and stuff without knowing the endpoint.

Sometimes, you don't realize that something is actually a sidetrack for the story, or it takes the tension out of a scene.