One of the things I love about my job as a playwright or as a screenwriter is that I get to do a lot of research and a lot of thinking and taking a lot of notes before I turn it in.
You're trying to bring a character to an audience, and tell stories. That's what we're all trying do.
Writing novels is the hardest thing I've ever done, including digging irrigation ditches.
Plot is a map and I begin with it. It is what made me admire the novels of the 19th century; that the stories are foreshadowed. TheyÕre going someplace.
I better make the plot good. I wanted to make it grip people on the first page and have a big turning point in the middle, as there is, and construct the whole thing like a roller coaster ride.
If you string together a set of speeches expressive of character, and well finished in point and diction and thought, you will not produce the essential tragic effect nearly so well as with a play which, however deficient in these respects, yet has a plot and artistically constructed incidents.
TV writing is for people who hate being alone more than they hate writing.
I do write a lot of prose. It's not disciplined enough yet that it's actually become stories, or short stories. The idea of writing a novel seems impossible.
Writing a screenplay is like writing a big puzzle, and so the hardest part, I think, is getting the story.
Writing a novel proved to be the hardest, most self-analyzing task I had ever attempted, far worse than an autobiography: and its rewards were greater than I expected.
As a rule, I don't worry about genre. I just want to tell a good story, with characters that interest me and my readers.
I love the writing process. It's something that I'm interested in personally and something I always do on every movie.
It's not so much that I enjoy screenwriting, though mostly I do, but the difference is, with adaptations, somebody else has done the hard part - made up a story, provided the characters.
But if you don't understand that story is character and not just idea, you will not be able to breathe life into even the most intriguing flash of inspiration.
The plot! The plot! What kind of plot could a poet possibly provide that is not surpassed by the thinking, feeling reader? Form alone is divine.
I think of a plot, I think of an idea, and then I wonder, How can I get that onto the stage? . . . Whatever devices you use should always be there to serve the theme. If the theme has been overtaken by the device, then something's wrong.
Plot comes first. The plot is the archictecture of your novel. You wouldn't build a house without a plan. If I wrote without a plot, it would just be a pile of bricks. Characters are your servants. They must serve your plot.
Any claim to actual identification as a drama must rest upon the construction of a plot independent of the assignment of affliction to the protagonist.
[E]very plot, worth the name, must be elaborated to its dénouement before anything be attempted with the pen. It is only with the dénouement constantly in view that we can plot its indispensable air of consequence, or causation, by making the incidents, and especially the tone at all points tend to the development of the intention.
Writers who can't invent stories often substitute style for narrative. They remind me of the painter who couldn't paint people, so he painted chairs.
[Gertrude Stein] really needed someone like Virgil Thomson, whom she respected, to sit on her a bit and make her devise some plot.
I knew nothing about the technique of story writing, and now, after eighteen years of writing, I still know nothing about the technique, although with the publication of my new novel, Tarzan and the Lost Empire, there are 31 books on my list.
All writing is discipline, but screenwriting is a drill sergeant.
The fiction is not autobiographical. Maybe to some extent it is, of course.
That's a very real feeling - that I don't have a story to tell. I'm not a pure storyteller. I have a tough time with story.
