Plot Coherence Quotes

The plot of a movie is its motor. It is not an accident that people call pictures 'vehicles' for stars. A vehicle has to move. A plotless story is like an expensive car with a wonderful body design, luxurious seats, upholstery, headlights (production, direction, cast) - and no motor under its hood. That is why it gets nowhere.

If action scenes just happen decontextualized, they lose their weight and the viewer can feel they don't make sense and that they wouldn't have happened that way.

You can have characters that say one thing and do another, and in certain kinds of drama, you can't get away with that because the audience will become confused - or certainly, the commissioners will become confused and tell you to stop doing it!

I could imagine that a character could do almost anything at any time, and that was the freedom of the whole thing. But keeping track of what was plausible for certain characters [was the challenge].

In real life, people are constantly saying one thing and doing another, but if you write your characters that way, the story becomes too hard to follow.

I'd like to work with some of the videogame companies for the simple fact that they obviously need some sort of writer's help. I play videogames, and lately it's hard for me to enjoy them because I'm spending all my time cringing at the corny dialogue, thin characters, and glaring plot holes.

Good stories flow like honey but bad stories stick in the craw [gullet]. What is a bad story? It's a story that cannot be absorbed in the first time of reading. It's a story that leaves questions unanswered.

Hollywood seems to succumb to fads. Well, action films do well. Give me violence. Give me a scene where there's a couple of car chases or shooting and stuff like that. They're forgetting the fact that there's a basic structure to a story that is essential to making it really broad and appealing.

With any sci-fi fantasy storytelling, you must have rules be very clear, otherwise you lose people, like 'OK, they can fly; now they can't fly.'

The title is the first thing that I have. Then when I have that title, I have to make sure that the title...is like, so...I have to make sure I can tell a whole story from that one title and like make sure that it, from beginning to end it makes sense.

The problem is, if you make a film that has certain implications in the story, and then you don't follow through, it's a cop out really, isn't it?

A film with an untidy plot cannot grip the audience and define their emotional response.

I'm not a big fan of introducing a bunch of new mysteries into a story without really knowing where they're going because you just end up struggling at the end to make sense of them and make it all seem like you planned it all along.

I think the days are over where we were okay with bad guys just doing the pirate laugh and eating kids just for fun. There has to be a goal, you know? They have to have a point, and they have to make sense.

Poorly written novels--no matter how pious and edifying the behavior of the characters--are not good in themselves and are therefore not really edifying.