Jon Favreau Quotes

Certainly, 3rd acts of any movie are hard. It's always hard to have something that will give you the promises from the beginning of the movie. That's true for all movies.

Plot is what happens in your story. Every story needs structure, just as every body needs a skeleton. It is how you 'flesh out and clothe' your structure that makes each story unique.

In plotting a book, my goal is to raise the stakes for the characters and, in so doing, keep the reader mesmerized.

An action movie should, like any other, follow the narrative traditions of literature. That means there should be subtlety, a slow build and a gradual bringing together of all the separate threads of the plot. To see all of it coming together slowly is very rewarding for the audience.

I better make the plot good. I wanted to make it grip people on the first page and have a big turning point in the middle, as there is, and construct the whole thing like a roller coaster ride.

A story really isn't truly a story until it reaches its climax and conclusion.

If you have a beautiful story, it has to have conflict. If you don't have conflict, it can't be a good story.

In each scene, the writer sets up a situation, which brings a conflict as well as either a small victory or a loss at the close of that particular scene.

From beginning to end it's about keeping the energy and the intensity of the story and not doing too much and not doing too little, but just enough so people stay interested and stay involved in the characters.

The thing should have plot and character, beginning, middle and end. Arouse pity and then have a catharsis. Those were the best principles I was ever taught.

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.

I guess I would say that most of what I've learned about storytelling derives from novels and short stories. I cannot think of a novel or story, or a novelist or story writer, who thinks in terms of three-act structure.

Titles are important; I have them before I have books that belong to them. I have last chapters in my mind before I see first chapters, too. I usually begin with endings, with a sense of aftermath, of dust settling, of epilogue.

You can read a dozen different textbooks or how-to manuals that will tell you the basic rules of what makes a story - a beginning, a middle, and an end.

Plots may be simple or complex, but suspense, and climactic progress from one incident to another, are essential. Every incident in a fictional work should have some bearing on the climax or denouement, and any denouement which is not the inevitable result of the preceding incidents is awkward and unliterary.

I'm never so into the three-act movie thing. I know that's the form that people talk about, but it seems to me, in the movie, you just have to keep charging forward. You couldn't start over again like you do after an intermission. You just had to keep the plot moving forward.

I think too often in films, people think endings are a summation of plot, and I don't like that. Because once you know where you're going as an audience member, then it's like a video game. You're just waiting for them to get through the levels and beat the bad guy. And I just think that's boring.

Fiction demands structures and recognizable shapes. Big surprises only draw attention to the writer's hand.

Good stories are driven by conflict, tension, and high stakes.

Oddly, the meanings of books are defined for me much more by their beginnings and middles than they are by their endings.

With a mini series you can give the story a proper sense of pacing, a proper sense of closure.

The main thing for me is I really like strong endings. If there's a strong ending, you can take more time in the beginning, your first act can be really quite different.

If you're gonna start a story, you start from the beginning, right?

My belief is that if you start a film all the way up at level 10, you've got nowhere to go.

Even if your novel occurs in an unfamiliar setting in which all the customs and surroundings will seem strange to your reader, it's still better to start with action. The reason for this is simple. If the reader wanted an explanation of milieu, he would read nonfiction. He doesn't want information. He wants a story.