Storytelling Flaws Quotes

While problems in a film are fairly easy to identify, the sources of those problems are often extraordinarily difficult to assess. A mystifying plot twist or a less-than-credible change of heart in our main character is often caused by subtle underlying issues elsewhere in the story.

If you have a problem with the third act, the real problem is in the first act.

He knew he couldn't tell stories, that he always included extraneous details & tangents that interested only him.

[Raymond] Chandler, I reread him, and there's a lot of bad writing there. I don't think he knew much about people.

In a zombie apocalypse movie, nobody's ever seen a zombie movie. Or in an alien invasion movie, nobody has ever seen an alien invasion movie, like 'Independence Day.'

You get to the end of something, you're laughing, you're like, 'That's funny, and that's funny,' and then you get to the end, and the credits come down, and you're like, 'That's it?! That's the whole thing?! You had me here for that?!' I just don't want to do that.

At this moment, the story in his head was perfect. He also knew from experience that it would degenerate the second he started typing, because such was the nature of writing.

At least half the mystery novels published violate the law that the solution, once revealed, must seem to be inevitable.

Any time two characters are talking about a third, the scene is a crock of s***.

It annoys me when contemporary films and television shows create artificial tensions that could easily be resolved by a quick email or the use of a search engine. 'La La Land' was guilty of this several times, as well as a more generalised aesthetic nostalgia.

In 'Serena,' stuff happens, then nastier stuff, without ever engaging the viewer's rooting interest or sick fear. Sometimes it's a question of sloppiness on the set or in the editing room.

I hate SF books that think all you need to make a book is cool technology and mind-bending ideas without a decent plot or characters. And I hate when fantasy books are allowed to ramble off into five hundred page diatribes which don't advance the story one bit.

My big thing was when you see a superhero movie where their powers ain't consistent - like, they lift a truck but then struggle to fight just a regular human being - it makes it harder to believe.

Among all the complaints you hear these days about the crimes of the media, it seems to me the critics miss the big one. It is that especially TV, but also we of the print press, tend to reduce mess and complexity and ambiguity to a simple story line that doesn't reflect reality so much as it distorts it. ... What bothers me about the journalistic tendency to reduce unmanageable reality to self-contained, movielike little dramas is not just that we falsify when we do this. It is also that we really miss the good story.

'The Sopranos' gets praised as novelistic, but it follows the most banal of life patterns, showing the sheer tedium of being a mobster. It has dead spots, boring plotlines, weak episodes. Characters develop slowly, or don't. Like viewers, a gangster might get bored, fade out of the action, then come back to find none of his debts forgotten.

If a character's suddenly spouting information that's supposed to bring you up to date, it can seem artificial or contrived.

I get fed up with plots that are driven by someone constantly getting information on a computer.

But are not the dreams of poets and the tales of travellers notoriously false?

To me, always just - that scene is, like, so convenient. They never run out of bullets in action movies, unless it's at the most dramatic time possible.

I always say, if a guy writes the same lead female character type over and over, we are not seeing their writing chops so much as their dating website wishlist.

I don't like novels that tie everything up in a plot-y way. I always think that's not really true of life, particularly of people in power.

I hate dream sequences in movies and T.V. shows generally for their heavy-handed symbolism and storytelling tediousness.

All joking aside, I'm a television watcher and I get frustrated with shows sometimes when they set up puzzles and then they don't give answers. It's just more questions and more questions.

I read one book where the characters never said anything; instead, they spent all their time grunting and bleating and hissing and cooing and growling and chirping and... It was like a menagerie in there. After a while, I wasn't even taking in the rest of the book, because that was all I could see: the dialogue tags.

That's the problem with them fables, they're putting animals together that wouldn't meet. I don't know where a scorpion is knockin' around with a frog.