Narrative Twist Quotes

Much of the time in the writer's room is spent working on story, and I was always challenging myself to make it more interesting, tighter and more surprising: to come at it sideways in a way that the audience wasn't expecting.

Being a magician taught me how powerful the element of surprise can be. In each book, I've tried to work that in - an unexpected twist in a story that reveals an insight, a counter intuitive study that turns your beliefs upside-down.

One of the hardest things to believe is that anyone will abandon the effort to escape a charge of murder. It is extremely important to suspend disbelief on that. If you don't, the story is spoiled.

In Victorian fiction, there would be a chapter at the end devoted to righting all of the wrongs. I thought to right all of the wrongs would be too glib. I thought it would be better to lull the reader into thinking that is the way it would work, but then not to do that.

Actually, after three years, I realised that the opening scenes of 'Polladhavan' were inspired by 'Lolita,' in which the lead character says, 'Why did I meet her? My life would have been different had I not met her.'

You often have a great director who's like, "Well, actually I don't even want to reveal you until the end of this scene" or something like that and it totally changes everything that you thought it was going to be.

A true storyteller is really good at writing himself into a corner and then finding a way out of that corner

As if there could be true stories: things happen in one way, and we retell them in the opposite way.

As we like to say on 'This Is Us,' death is not a release. Our main character has never been alive for the entire run!

Once upon a time, Sleeping Beauty decided to take a nap from which she would never wake up.

There's a certain joy in taking a dramatic narrative and then adding that element of horror to it.

I would say anything is possible on 'Jane the Virgin.'

You're always looking for some new way to tell the same story, but it's how they get to the happy end that is the challenge and the fun for a writer.

Producing is figuring out how to make each character have a distinct voice, how to make the story twist and turn - that's the biggest challenge.

Sometimes not honoring your character makes for really good television, but that also can really upset fans. You have to turn things upside sometimes. As a storyteller, you have to know that sometimes you're going to let your fans and the audience down because you have to do your part in servicing the story.

A good story will keep you wondering about what's happening, what's going on, where does this go? Now it's going to go that way, now it's going to go that way. It has to do that. If it's predictable, it's just boring.

A well-written character is one where you don't know in which direction it's going; the character could spring a surprise any moment.

One of the things that really impressed me about Anna Karenina when I first read it was how Tolstoy sets you up to expect certain things to happen - and they don't. Everything is set up for you to think Anna is going to die in childbirth. She dreams it's going to happen, the doctor, Vronsky and Karenin think it's going to happen, and it's what should happen to an adulteress by the rules of a nineteenth-century novel. But then it doesn't happen. It's so fascinating to be left in that space, in a kind of free fall, where you have no idea what's going to happen.