Story Expansion Quotes

NOVEL, n. A short story padded.

Building upon the world we created with 'Avatar' has been a rare and incredibly rewarding experience. In writing the new films, I've come to realize that 'Avatar's world, story and characters have become even richer than I anticipated, and it became apparent that two films would not be enough to capture everything I wanted to put on screen.

You always have three movies that you have to reduce into one. You have the screenplay. And then, you do a workshop and you add more scenes. And then, on the day you shoot, there's more action and interaction. It's like a souffle. It has a tendency to just grow and explode, and it's just too long.

That movie [A Series of Unfortunate Events] told four books in two hours, and we have two hours per book. So we have eight hours to tell four books, and if people watch we'll get to tell more of them. There's only thirteen books, so there's only going to be two more seasons, but that allows for a lot of time to be in character and to maintain character.

I want to tell Miranda's story more broadly than what I have been in these five-minute videos on the Internet. She can live in a longer format.

People think, 'Oh, well how can 'The Hobbit,' which is one book, become three films?' But you can take one line from an appendice and it turns into a whole sequence.

Ramona was originally an accidental character I added to the Henry Huggins books because I noticed that none of the characters had siblings. I added Ramona as Beazus' pestering little sister.

I was excited about the fourth movie I guess conceptually because, what I felt we should do it, we should try to make it a conceptual jump like Terminator did to T2. It was still the Terminator franchise, but it was something kind of bigger and grander.

In March of 2001, I revisited the short story, and found that thought it did not work well as a short story, it might work much better as a longer one. The novel [The Kite Runner] came about as an expansion of that original, unpublished short story.

Writing 'Book 1: The Maze of Bones' didn't feel much different than writing one of my other novels, but I thought it was very innovative to offer the website and trading card components as well for those readers who wanted to go more in depth with the Cahill experience.

Most obviously it [Doctor Strange] will introduce a new character who will be in play in the universe, but once you have gotten an audience to buy into a new concept then it's fun to keep, to play-off, or spin-off that concept down the line.

I did not know at first that it would be a series; I discovered after the first novel that I had more to say about it, so I did another. And another, and then the readers demanded yet more.

I think book adaptations, the best one to me is like 'Brokeback Mountain.' Which is a short story, 21 pages, that expands so beautifully into a movie.

With 'Twilight,' you have these massive tomes that you have to condense. With 'Penoza,' we had an eight episode Dutch series that, just for the pilot alone, I condensed three episodes. So, there's a lot of filling in and a ton of invention that has to happen to fill out eight episodes.

Hopefully, if I have done my job right, people will want to know and see more! There is certainly plenty more to tell. I would love to be part of that process of expanding on the lore that makes up Warcraft, but it will all depend on what you, the audience, think of our first film!

Whenever I start a book, I swear it's going to be a short one. But then it's, 'Who was his grandfather? And how did he get there in the first place? And what kind of animals is he chasing?'

In writing 'William Shakespeare's Star Wars,' I had the freedom to go beyond the original script and add asides, soliloquys and even new scenes. The main characters all get a soliloquy or two - or in Luke's case, several.

The film opens up the world beyond Katniss' point of view, allowing the audience access to the happenings of places like the Hunger Games control room and President Snow's rose garden, thereby adding a new dimension to the story.

The Swords were still interesting but by then a cast of characters had started to appear and go on from book to book, and other things about the world began to feel constricting. And there were other things I wanted to do, so I closed the series up and stopped it.

Narrative and characters have always interested me. I never tried to alienate an audience. Of course, gradually, I wanted a bigger and bigger space to draw people in, so it's very organic [growth].

I thought 'UnSouled' would come in at around 400 pages, but it took 650 pages, and even then I felt like I was rushing the conclusion, so I asked my editor and publisher if I could divide it again. So a sequel became a trilogy, and the trilogy became a tetralogy - although we're not calling it that.

In the second season, usually television shows are running with the characters; they really get them. And then, the third season, they can push characters and really explore secondary storylines and things like that. And so I tend to like third seasons of most shows.

You can't take a story and just stretch it out - that does not a novel make.

Each week the machine is spitting out a number for a new person or a new world within New York that you get to know. And the idea from the beginning was that some of the characters would stick around and become part of the lives of the show, and the world of the show itself will continue to grow.

So if you want to have a great video game-based movie you have to keep the mood of the game, use the normal character setup - but you have to flesh out the story and provide more background for the characters.