Plot Focus Quotes

I think the great thing about the Jack Ryan films is that the plot and the story always take center stage. If you've done your job as the actor portraying Jack Ryan, you are present enough to make an impact, but you let the story shine.

So I work hard to present the human side of my characters while not neglecting the plot.

'Crocodile Dundee' is about people; it's 10 seconds about crocodiles.

Once you figure out what's best for the story, take out the rest.

One of the nice things about a second book is that your readers already have so much of the introductions on board, they don't have to put all their attention into figuring out the world and can more easily let that play out as a background to the other things you want to do.

I look for absurdly simple plots so that I can simply focus on the characters. Having an understanding of what dialogue's easy to say and hard to say - I think that that's helpful, too.

I think it's refreshing to have a character-driven 'Batman' story that isn't just about action and getting out of scrapes.

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

I like taking a character at the most intense moments of their lives and exploring all that in full and then moving on.

But I'm a fairly mechanical worker - I tend not to think about themes so much as plot. I want to get the feeling right. If it's moving through tunnels, I ask myself, what is it like to move through tunnels?

You can't, no matter what anyone says, build a movie around someone.

Anybody who sits down to write, and they think 'thriller,' maybe shouldn't be thinking that way. Maybe we should be thinking 'novel,' maybe 'thriller' way in the background, but that these are real people to whom things are happening. It just happens to be a hell of an exciting story.

'The 25th Hour' came out of the decision - a really very conscious decision - that I needed a story set within a compressed time frame because that would help focus the story.

I think a lot of drama, nowadays, is character-based and development-based, but 'True Blood' is very plot-oriented.

Comics have years to explain this stuff, and in a movie, you have to focus on one thing. So it's about kind of streamlining, I think. Some of the most successful origin films actually have a narrower focus.

It's hard to hold the focus that strongly on a single character for that long.

Too much detail can bog down any story. Enough with the history of gunpowder, the geology of Hawaii, the processes of whaling, and cactus and tumbleweed.

There's also something happening in television similar to what happened in the '80s, when people stopped taking so many drugs and wanted to hear real instruments in music again. I think people want plot, story and characters. Those are more important than having a big star.

My outlines can be 10-20 pages in length and focus primarily on the physical active plot over the emotional plot.