Organic Storytelling Quotes

When I write my novels I don't really have a huge plan beforehand; I don't have the whole plot and architecture, so the story is sort of discovered as I write it.

I don't really mind not being a part of a film - because if there is no part for me, I will never force myself upon a film. I feel like it's just a distraction. If it is not organically incorporated into the story, it just feels like a stupid appearance, like a sort of wink. I hate that.

A lot of Christmas episodes feel like stories in quotation marks. Uh, a homeless guy comes to live with them and they all learn a lesson. That didn't come from an organic place.

I hate outlines. I have a broad sense of where the story is going; I know the end, I know the end of the principal characters, and I know the major turning points and events from the books, the climaxes for each book, but I don't necessarily know each twist and turn along the way. That's something I discover in the course of writing and that's what makes writing enjoyable. I think if I outlined comprehensively and stuck to the outline the actual writing would be boring.

When I write, I never know the endings. What I think works in [my] stories is the fact that when I write, I really want to find out what is going on-I'm writing for myself as a reader. It's like when you dream a dream. I want to know what's behind the door. If I navigate, it's from a place that's totally intuitive.

When I'm making a movie, I don't like to know what's going to happen next. I like to watch something and be surprised all the time, and just not know, and let it take me wherever.

I always worry that knowing too much about a novel or a story early on in writing will close it down - it feels fatalistic in some way.

If something wants to be a story, it will be.

I never plan. I never know what the next page is going to be..... But that's the fun of writing a novel or a story, because I don't know what's going to happen next.

At the time I begin writing a novel, the last thing I want to do is follow a plot outline. To know too much at the start takes the pleasure out of discovering what the book is about.

Get to know your characters as well as you can let there be something at stake, and then let the chips fall where they may.

My style of writing is to allow the story to unfold on its own. I try not to structure my work too rigidly.

You have to understand that while I pre-plot the meta story of a given book, I often have no idea of what will happen on the next page, let alone the next chapter. That's what makes it fun for me; I write the books the same way many people read them.

I like to allow a story to arise as I'm writing scripts. I find it horrible when I try to think of something for the plot without really being on the ground and seeing where it goes.

I think the camera has got to be motivated. You can't have things arrived at gratuitously. Everything has to have an organic function, but the more comfortable I've become and the more imaginative and sophisticated and the more exploratory I've become at the medium, the more I've subtly deviated away from that in various ways.

A story is an end in itself. It is not written to teach, sell, explain or destroy anything. It is not written even to entertain. It is written as a man is born - an organic whole, dictated only by its own laws and its own necessity - an end in itself, not a means to an end.

I write intuitively, and with most of my plays, I don't know what is always going to happen. This means I can sometimes go off on a wrong tangent, and with luck then rewrite it in a better direction. But it means I sometimes surprise myself as I'm going along.

When you start, it's very cold, an impossible task. But then maybe the characters start to take on a little bit of life, or the story takes a turn that you don't expect ... With me that happens a lot because I don't outline, I just have a vague notion. So it's always felt like less of a made thing and more of a found thing. That's exciting. That's a thrill.

I never know what's going to happen in a novel. I don't have a plan or an outline.

Don't rush or force the ending. All you have to know is the next scene, or the next few scenes.

I never sat down and said, 'I'm going to write historical fiction with strong romantic elements.' It was just the way the stories went.

We have a writing process that's very much you try to create the character in a complicated way and then you let the story lead you to discovering who the character is in a natural way.

Let the story lead you. If the story needs to be dark, let it go dark. If it's a sweet, good-for-the-world story, that's what it is.

...my basic belief about the making of stories is that they pretty much make themselves.

I don't want my novel to be like Madame Bovary, finely crafted with the life edited out of it. I want my novel to be like a friend telling me a story -- so we go off on thoughts; that's the way it is.