Andrew Shaffer Quotes

As a writer, I challenge myself not to tell the same story - to tackle different characters with different issues.

Writing a novel is not at all like riding a bike. Writing a novel is like having to redesign a bike, based on laws of physics that you don't understand, in a new universe. So having written one novel does nothing for you when you have to write the second one.

When I read a book, I like to be surprised. I don't want to read the same genre formula that I've read a hundred times before.

It's fun to twist fairy tales, but at the same time, I know I need to write stories that are different enough from each other that fans don't feel like they're just reading the same story over and over again.

It's a challenge to turn a book series into a television series; you need to keep people on their toes, but you also want to be true to the source material.

Even though 'Glee' is sometimes a hard road, I am very excited about writing a multi-year arc.

The biggest challenge of my career, which is something that authors of genre fiction face all the time, is writing something fresh and new and at the same time meeting reader expectations.

The key to any good comic strip or television sitcom is to reset the board at the end of the episode because people like familiarity.

The suspense of a novel is not only in the reader, but in the novelist, who is intensely curious about what will happen to the hero.

A lot of crime writing suffers from treading water. I feel an obligation to move the character on and not repeat myself. I try to fit him into a different period and a different agenda. That way, you learn slightly more about his personal history in the tradition of the unreliable narrator. It makes it more challenging to write.

For me, writing a short story is much, much harder than writing a novel.

We're past the age of heroes and hero kings... Most of our lives are basically mundane and dull, and it's up to the writer to find ways to make them interesting.

My mother could never understand why I didn't write a thriller, which I've finally done.

If you get a bad script, then you start expending energy trying to make a silk purse of a sow's ear. When the script's as good as those on 'Game of Thrones,' say, I don't think there was a single occasion where any of us thought there was a bad scene.

I like to be surprised. Fresh implications and plot twists erupt as a story unfolds. Characters develop backgrounds, adding depth and feeling. Writing feels like exploring.

The way I like to work is to attach personal experiences to what I'm doing, so it helps tremendously if I can write my own play under what the writer has written.

That's what fiction writers do: create characters and do terrible things to them for the entertainment of others. If they feel guilty enough, they write happy endings.

What I do is put my characters into situations that are so precarious there is no way to get out. And then I figure how to get them out.

The few times I've tried to write original screenplays, it's a difficult process because I just don't feel like I know the characters the way I know them after the year or two it takes to write a novel.

It takes me a very, very long time to write a story, to write a piece of fiction, whatever you call the fiction that I write. I just go about it blindly, feeling my way towards what it has to be.

I like making stories and characters that people can relate to. I also like giving the audience a departure from whatever they're thinking about in their life and enjoying a show or a movie.

'For Whom the Bell Tolls' was a problem which I carried on each day. I knew what was going to happen in principle. But I invented what happened each day I wrote.

I am much more aware of making the plot more original, avoiding contrivance, having the story matter much more. I used to think more about symbols consciously. Now I think much more about the story.

Once, I optioned a novel and tried to do a screenplay on it, which was great fun, but I was too respectful. I was only 100 pages into the novel and I had about 90 pages of movie script going. I realized I had a lot to learn.

I guarantee you that two directors that are any good can take the same story, change the name of the characters, change the name of the town, and make an entirely different picture.