Narrative Pacing Quotes

'Game Of Thrones' was too big a canvas for a movie, but 'Dirty White Boys' is like a great old Western: there's so much compression, and it's so pressurized, it demands to be told in one sitting.

More and more, I tried to make comics in the way I like to read comics, and I found that when I read comics that are really densely packed with text, it may be rewarding when I finally do sit down and read it, but it never is going to be the first I'm going to read, and I never am fully excited to just sit down and read that comic.

Don't mistake a good setup for a satisfying conclusion - many beginning writers end their stories when the real story is just ready to begin.

At the very core of what a comic is, time and space are kind of the same thing. When your reader moves her eyes across the page, she should be moving through time in your story.

Pace is crucial. Fine writing isn't enough. Writing students can be great at producing a single page of well-crafted prose; what they sometimes lack is the ability to take the reader on a journey, with all the changes of terrain, speed and mood that a long journey involves. Again, I find that looking at films can help. Most novels will want to move close, linger, move back, move on, in pretty cinematic ways.

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

I could never be a part of an adaptation of a film where there's pressure to not disappoint the immense fan base. In those cases, they often wind up with filmed books on tape, quite uncinematic. Having said that, I'd say all the adaptations I've done are quite faithful to the original... You have to pick and choose which storylines and plot threads, because you don't have the time to kill in the film as they have in novels. All those pages with detours and plots and different storylines. But films add a lot, and you gotta keep it moving.

I draw on a lot of cinematic influences like Ingmar Bergman and Wim Wenders, artists who let a story take its time. Comics are a visual medium, and visuals should be allowed to tell some of that story.

I let myself go at the beginning and write with an easy mind, but by the time I get to the middle I begin to grow timid and to fear my story will be too long. . .That is why the beginning of my stories is always very promising and looks as though I were starting on a novel, and the middle is huddled and timid, and the end is...like fireworks.

When you're writing TV or movies your vernacular is time, it's all based on rhythms, a character takes a beat or two characters have a moment, like everything is about time. And when you're writing a comic, everything is about space. It's how many panels to put on a page, when should you do a full page splash, what is the detail that you see in any particular image.

Characters must not brood too long. They must not waste time running up and down ladders in their own insides.

With a pilot, there's a lot of information that gets packed into 46 minutes or whatever it is. Usually what happens is that, throughout the season, you get to spend a little more quality time with the characters and get to know them a bit better, whether it's based on circumstance or relationships they've created with other characters.

But stories somehow lengthen when begun.

What justifies a character singing one idea for 3 minutes on the screen? I get impatient and want the story to carry on. I don't get impatient in the theatre.

I've never been a big fan of the music-video style of editing movies that crept in the last few decades. I like stuff that's able to take its time.

So much of comics are dictated by characters talking to one another - or in focused spaces where 'the camera' has to stay in pretty close on what's going on.

Writing is the same as music. It’s in how you phrase it, how you hold back the note, bend it, shape it, then release it. And what you don’t play is as important as what you do say.

There's this thing in TV that I find hysterical where the writers and creators will ask us if you want to know what happens to your character or if you want to experience it episode by episode. In the theatre, we always know the ending; we always know where the character is going.

I'd been concerned all along that the character of the president in the West Wing pilot would throw the ensemble out of whack, that that character would simply take up all the oxygen in a room. I wanted to hold off bringing this character in until the last possible moment.

All writing is discipline, but screenwriting is a drill sergeant.

Plot exposition that can be gently wound out by the authorial voice and internal monologue of a character in the length of a page has to be delivered in a matter of seconds on the stage.

I always write too long in the beginning, then it is a matter of going through it over and over again on subsequent drafts, looking for anything that slows down the narrative. It can be hard, cutting out parts I love, but I try to make the book as tight as possible so that the reader doesn't get bored.

It's my passion, that's what I wanna do, it's the end goal, that's what I crave every second of the day is to be working on a production but also to be the person leading the production and guiding the pacing of the storytelling.

Gertrude Stein was masterly in making nothing happen very slowly.

With relatively few exceptions, the novel sacrifices too much, for me, on the altar of plot.