Narrative Continuity Quotes

I didn't really watch the show [Star Trek]. I still haven't seen about 150 of them. So I didn't really think of them too much in terms of episodes. I thought of them as kind of one long seven-year episode.

As a kid, I always loved serialized books. It's the reason why people love 'Harry Potter.' Serialization is amazing. It works in television. It works in film and it works in books. Especially when you're a young kid, you get attached to these characters.

I think if you have a series for a long time, it's in some ways like being in a play with a long run - in that the character stays the same - and so you are constantly posed with the challenge of making it interesting and unique week after week, year after year.

It's tricky to do a serialized show and not lose viewers along the way because you really have to watch every episode.

Am I a guy who writes about himself in a comic book, or am I just a character in that book? If I die, will that character keep going, or will he just fade away?

Is it not superfluous to write more than one novel if the writer has not become, say, a new man? Obviously, all the novels of an author not infrequently belong together and are to a certain degree only one novel.

I did not know at first that it would be a series; I discovered after the first novel that I had more to say about it, so I did another. And another, and then the readers demanded yet more.

The pattern of the narrative never of necessity wants to end, it never has to.

It's impossible for me, without getting a big wide shot of Manhattan, to convince people that it's another day. But if we go to a commercial and we come up and people are in different clothes, you know it's another day.

It is never possible for a novelist to deny time inside the fabric of his novel: he must cling, however lightly, to the thread of his story, he must touch the interminable tapeworm, otherwise he becomes unintelligible, which, in his case, is a blunder.

Transitions are critically important. I want the reader to turn the page without thinking she's turning the page. It must flow seamlessly.

As we watch TV or films, there are no organic transitions, only edits. The idea of A becoming B, rather than A jumping to B, has become foreign.

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

Ordinary facts are arranged within time, strung along its length as on a thread. There they have their antecedents and their consequences, which crowd tightly together and press hard one upon the other without any pause. This has its importance for any narrative, of which continuity and successiveness are the soul.

One of the things I do take some pride in is that if you had never read an article about my life, if you knew nothing about me, except that my books were being set in front of you to read, and if you were to read those books in sequence, I don't think you would say to yourself, 'Oh my God, something terrible happened to this writer in 1989.'

Back when we started this at the tail end of 'Eye of the North,' Ree Soesbee and I worked out 250 years of timeline between the end of 'Eye of the North' and the beginning of 'Guild Wars 2.'

A typical TV show is always about protecting the franchise - it's all about stretching it out as long as you can take it. And it's about taking the characters in any given hour as far as you can take them, but then resetting them more or less back to zero so at the beginning of the next week, so they're still the character you know and love.

There is a Steve [Jobs] that Apple would like to actually present to the public. They have a character, Steve, and they want to keep that story going. And it's very important that writers challenge that occasionally and not just trust their parent companies to tell them.

There are story-room sessions where you think about the big picture, like a novel, but once you have certain things in place, you have to treat each episode like an hour of TV, and think that maybe this will be the only episode that anyone will ever watch. You want to have some sort of beginning, middle, and end to the episode, even if you have storylines that are carrying over. You still want it to feel like a cohesive hour of entertainment. And you can't think about both at the same time.

The novelist in me is probably hiding behind all the stories I write, looking for ways to connect them and continue the conversation with readers. Maybe I'm writing one long narrative, and each book, however different from the last, is just a chapter.

At this point in my career, 'Scream' is one of the longest running stories I've told. It's fascinating to still have actors who are very much into continuing their roles and have great chemistry.

TV is designed to keep characters in place for years on end. The best example is 'M*A*S*H:' You have a three-year police action in Korea, and they stretched that out to eleven seasons. It was a great show, but when you think about it, a weird unreality overtakes a television series. You see the actors age, and yet the characters don't.

I want to be true to the character and maintain some consistency and give the audience what they love while at the same time keeping things fresh and grow the character.

Because of streaming, serialized television has become less of a dirty word when you're pitching shows. I had to fight for that for so long as someone who's always gravitated towards ongoing story lines with characters that evolved and changed and storylines that continued over longer arcs.

It's very difficult to have a successful series that can continue to capture and captivate an audience and keep people interested. Because the story, you've got to be able to continue to tell this story.