Top 100 Quotes About Plot Writing
#1. The books people are writing today, they're too long. You get a little bit of plot, and then pages and pages of Creative Writing. They teach classes in how to do this. They should teach classes in how to stop!
Douglas Adams
#2. As a matter of writing philosophy, if there is one, I try not to ever plot a story. I try to write it from the character's point of view and see where it goes.
Andre Dubus III
#3. A lot of (children's literature) beginners get bogged down by morals. A moral should never be driving the story. And a moral should never be confused with a plot. You can't preach to kids, and you can't talk down to them, either. It's amazing how they sense condescension.
Patty Smith
#4. I don't have a name and I don't have a plot. I have the typewriter and I have white paper and I have me, and that should add up to a novel.
(- Saroyan, when once asked the name of his next book.)
William, Saroyan
#5. But it isn't a rough draft either. The one I turned in several months ago was rough. There were some bad plot holes, some logical inconsistencies, pacing problems, and not nearly enough lesbian unicorns.
Patrick Rothfuss
#6. Characters are incredibly important, but I tend to build them around the plot during the outline stage. However, once I'm writing the manuscript, the characters I'm writing dictate how the plot unfolds.
Aimee Carter
#7. I was Paul Schrader's assistant for six months before I went to film school, and he's very much about knowing what's going to happen on every page before you even start writing dialogue - the entire plot and character arcs are mapped out.
Jonathan Levine
#8. If I had a plot that was all set in advance, why would I want go through the agony of writing the novel? A novel is a kind of exploration and discovery, for me at any rate.
Chaim Potok
#9. Writing is truly a creative art - putting word to a blank piece of paper and ending up with a full-fledged story rife with character and plot.
William Shatner
#10. Plot is tremendously important to me: I can't stand books where nothing happens, and I can't imagine ever writing a novel without at least one murder.
Ned Beauman
#11. At the time I begin writing a novel, the last thing I want to do is follow a plot outline. To know too much at the start takes the pleasure out of discovering what the book is about.
Elmore Leonard
#12. I like writing non-fiction - and when you pick a [non-fiction] subject, it saves you the hassle of coming up with a plot.
Richard Hell
#13. There's an old rule of theater that goes, 'If there's a gun on the mantel in Act I, it must go off in Act III.' The reverse is also true.
Stephen King
#14. I wonder if Stephen King ever uses dreams in his writing. You know, as yeast to make the plot rise.
Stephen King
#15. Don't resist the urge to burn down the stronghold, kill off the main love interest or otherwise foul up the lives of your characters.
Patricia Hamill
#16. When I am writing a book, I'll go to sleep with a plot hole in my story that I don't know how to fix. When I wake up, I know. It's as if it were there all along and I just needed the right sleep to access the answer.
Tarryn Fisher
#17. In a lot of ways, TV writing taught me how to be a good storyteller. I learned about dialogue, scenes, moving the plot forward.
Maria Semple
#19. Writing for the theater is a whole different can of fish. The music now has the responsibility of so many things. The plot could be giving you different views of the character; the emotional highlights of a moment.
Frank Wildhorn
#20. To be stories at all they must be a series of events: but it must be understood that this series - the plot, as we call it - is only really a new whereby to catch something else.
C.S. Lewis
#21. When I write my novels I don't really have a huge plan beforehand; I don't have the whole plot and architecture, so the story is sort of discovered as I write it.
Michael Ondaatje
#22. The characters are always the focal point of a book for me, whether I'm writing or reading. I may enjoy a book that has an intriguing mystery or a good plot, but to become one of my real favorites, it has to have great characters.
Candace Camp
#23. In everything I've written, the crime has always just been an occasion to write about other things. I don't have a picture of myself as writing crime novels. I like fairly strong narratives, but it's a way of getting a plot moving.
Peter Temple
#24. I was born in the era of the novel. I've written many, as well as collections of poetry, and essays for mouthing off. I've written to inches, word-counts, page-counts, even the sonnet and the screenplay (which I call a plot poem). I write narrative. That's it. I just want to tell it.
Julianna Baggott
#25. A plot without action is like pasta without garlic, like Dolly Parton without cleavage, and like a writer without his similes.
Dean Koontz
#26. I eat broccoli. I think about the plot. I pace in circles for hours, counter-clockwise, listening to music. I try to think of one detail in the scene I'm about to write that I'm really excited about writing. Until I can come up with that one detail, I pace.
Matthew Tobin Anderson
#27. Plot as such is not a major ingredient in my novels ... it's often better to sail on the unconscious sea.
Richard Adams
#28. When I started 'Still Missing,' I had a few key plot points in mind, which I played around with mentally for a couple of months, then one day I just started writing. Not having an outline led to some cool plot twists, but also many rewrites! A lot of the plotting happened on subsequent drafts.
Chevy Stevens
#29. Even if I never sold another book, I'd keep writing, because the stories are here, in my head. Stories that just need to be told. I love watching a plot unfold, and feeling the surprise when the unexpected happens.
Tess Gerritsen
#30. Characters make their own plot. The dimensions of the characters determine the action of the novel.
Harper Lee
#31. Making up characters and places and plots, unlike fixing your plumbing or doing dishes, is anything but practical or rational. I write what needs to be written the way that seems genuinely right.
Etgar Keret
#32. Details are where a theory can be held together or fall apart. The same is true about a plot.
Sarah Richards
#33. There you are, Ariadne," said Robin. "The whole plot of your next novel presented to you. All you'll have to do is work in a few false clues, and - of course - do the actual writing.
Agatha Christie
#34. Nonfiction ties your hands a bit, and just like writing poetry in rhyme, it can force you to make more brutal decisions in terms of word choice, plot, etc.
Emily Susan Rapp
#35. On November 18 of alternate years Mr Earbrass begins writing 'his new novel'. Weeks ago he chose its title at random from a list of them he keeps in a little green note-book. It being tea-time of the 17th, he is alarmed not to have thought of a plot to which The Unstrung Harp might apply.
Edward Gorey
#36. T[he rules of writing] require that the episodes in a tale shall be necessary parts of the tale, and shall help to develop it.
Mark Twain
#37. Plot springs from character ... I've always sort of believed that these people inside me- these characters- know who they are and what they're about and what happens, and they need me to help get it down on paper because they don't type.
Anne Lamott
#38. Usually when I put my focus on the pacing, the plot, the specific characterizations, - it's ironic - but then I actually increase my chances of writing something that moves people because I haven't become too self-conscious of the goal.
Christopher Rice
#39. In our modern age, there are writers who have heaped scorn on the very idea of the primacy of story. I'd rather warm my hands on a sunlit ice floe than try to coax fire from the books they carve from glaciers.
Pat Conroy
#41. I'm always writing about character first. Plot, such as it is, comes from the characters.
Daniel Woodrell
#42. It's one of the most liberating things I experience in writing - letting yourself get rid of a gesture or character or plot point that always nagged, even if you couldn't admit to yourself that it did.
Leslie Jamison
#43. New dramatic writing has banished conversational dialogue from the stage as a relic of dramaturgy based on conflict and exchange: any story, intrigue or plot that is too neatly tied up is suspect.
Patrice Pavis
#44. You cherry-pick events that are relevant to the story question and construct a gauntlet of challenge (read: the plot) that will force the protagonist to put his money where his mouth is. Think baptism by ever-escalating fire.
Lisa Cron
#45. I began to write fiction on the assumption that the true enemies of the novel were plot, character, setting and theme, and having once abandoned these familiar ways of thinking about fiction, totality of vision or structure was really all that remained.
John Hawkes
#46. The characters write the plot. Their natures do.
Norman Rush
#47. In commercial fiction especially, everything in the story usually contributes directly to the plot The shorter the story, the truer this is
Nancy Kress
#48. The Thickety is a sinister, magical debut with a marvelous and shocking heroine. J.A. White's elegant writing and masterful plot kept me turning pages late into the night.
Lisa McMann
#49. To unlock the writer's block is to keep writing until you can unknot the "not". If you cannot, then put a can in the plot and unwrap it a lot!
Ana Claudia Antunes
#50. He must shape simultaneously (in an expanding creative moment) his characters, plot, and setting, each inextricably connected to the others; he must make his whole world in a single, coherent gesture, as a potter makes a pot ...
John Gardner
#51. Well, it's my voice, so it's more accessible that way, and there are also all sorts of things like plot and timelines that are already known entities, so for me, it's very different from writing fiction.
Alice Sebold
#52. The greatest compliment a writer can be given is that a story and character hold a reader spellbound. I'm caught up in the story writing and I miss a good deal of sleep thinking about it and working out the plot points.
Iris Johansen
#53. I work on one book at a time. And yes, I am immersed. Six days a week for four to six hours a day. In between books, I stop writing for as much as two to three months, but during that time, I do research and think, plot and plan the book.
M.J. Rose
#54. I have no problem in moving a date one way or another or coming up with a subplot that gets my characters in (or out) of a fix more rambunctiously than the extant records show.
Sara Sheridan
#55. I'm a pantser. I try to plot. I always try to plot. I end up with a few paragraphs that basically outline the gist of the story.But I never get much beyond that. I get too impatient to write.
Pamela Clare
#56. You learn to do your best writing on story rather than off story. Very often at the beginning of their careers, writers including me do their best dialogue writing off story - the best lines, the best observations - but they haven't got enough to do with the plot to stay in.
Victor Levin
#57. I write poems about relationships, love relationships, and I'm not able to do that all the time. I could go two years without writing poems, and then write a dozen. Having a novel to work on, with the intricate puzzle of character and plot to work out, is satisfying for the time there is no poetry.
May Sarton
#58. A risk for a poet-novelist is imbalance: The poems can flatten into prose or lose their intensity of focus; the novels can stall amid lofty writing or literary preciousness and ignore the engine of plot and character.
Floyd Skloot
#59. Of course the play as I wrote it amounted to nothing; but in weaving the plot through successive scenes, and in writing out some of the dialogues, I enjoyed the full bliss of literary creation. Never to have tasted this delight is never to have known one of the greatest joys of life.
Carl Schurz
#60. How do I happen to believe in God? . . . Writing novels, I got into the habit of looking for plots. After awhile, I began to suspect that my own life had a plot. And after awhile more, I began to suspect that life itself has a plot. - FREDERICK BUECHNER
Sarah Arthur
#61. When his writing is going well, Gordon Strangle Mars likes to wake up at 6 a.m. and go out driving. He works out new plot lines about giant spiders and keeps an eye out for abandoned couches, which he wrestles into the back of his pickup truck. Then he writes for the rest of the day.
Kelly Link
#62. The telling of any character is what they do in a different situation.
Sara Sheridan
#63. So now you have it. The plot, the whole plot, and nothing but the plot.
Elizabeth Peters
#64. Where do writers get their ideas from? Anywhere and everywhere.
Nothing is sacred.
Darynda Jones
#65. When all the details fit in perfectly, something is probably wrong with the story.
Charles Baxter
#66. The person you are (in total, at that moment in time) is what creates the story you're writing. It's infused in every piece of punctuation, in the plot, in the most minor character who crosses the page. It's all your voice.
Victor LaValle
#67. In my case, if I start out by thinking about the plot, things don't go well. Small points, such as my impression of what is likely to occur, do come to mind, but I let the rest of the story take its own course. I don't want to spend as long as two years writing a story whose plot I already know.
Haruki Murakami
#68. I start with an image, then I go from the image toward exploring the situation. Then I write a scene, and from the scene I find the character, from the character I find the larger plot. It's like deductive reasoning - I start with the smaller stuff and work backward.
Dan Chaon
#69. You mean you don't fit characters into a plot? excatly ...
John Geddes
#70. I love writing both fiction and memoir. Both have unique challenges; bottom line, fiction is hard because you have to come up with the credible, twisty plot, and memoir is hard because you have to say something true and profound, albeit in a funny way.
Lisa Scottoline
#71. You don't need to know the purpose as you write, but when you read over something you've written, you should be able to point to any given element - be that a line of dialogue, a descriptive phrase, a plot point - and say why it's there.
Diana Gabaldon
#72. Plot joined the expedition unwooed, as a necessary companion. It was not the scout. The scout was a certain mood. I followed that mood, and let the shape of the story flow from that.
Bonnie Friedman
#73. Writing a log line helps you define - for yourself - the essential elements of the plot. It will also let you know immediately if major components of the plot are missing.
David Macinnis Gill
#74. As regards plot I find real life no help at all. Real life seems to have no plots. And as I think a plot desirable and almost necessary, I have this extra grudge against life.
Ivy Compton-Burnett
#75. In writing, I'm totally anti-plans of any kind. All my attempts to plan and plot novels have come to grief, and in expensive ways.
Peter Temple
#76. I feel like having details from their day and having a plot and action and things to do is much more revealing than having a character sitting and thinking to themselves. When I'm writing, I want people to actually have a goal, something that's dragging them forward.
Kaui Hart Hemmings
#77. With six weeks' worth of recuperation time, you'll also be able to see any glaring holes in the plot or character development. And listen
if you spot a few of these big holes, you are forbidden to feel depressed about them or to beat up on yourself. Screw-ups happen to the best of us.
Stephen King
#78. Overall, I was generally "delighted" with the book's story -- writing, theme, plot, etc. Seriously, though, I really did revel in it. After all, "what is a book for if not for our enjoyment?
Chris Mentillo
#79. I had a plot connection that nobody understood for this fourth character, and decided, Oh, nobody gets it, that's all. I'll write another draft to make her make sense. It took me awhile to learn that these three people were the core of this play, which seems so obvious now.
Richard Greenberg
#80. He comes, he sleeps, he goes. So the plot thickens.
Shadowlands
#81. I begin by writing paragraphs that don't have an immediate relation to a plot. The sound of the story comes first.
Grace Paley
#82. Most games follow a real railroad plot, no matter what you want, you're following their storyline to its unavoidable conclusion. I'd like to write a game where your character can follow any number of possible story arcs and sub-plots.
Patrick Rothfuss
#83. When you get ready to write your novel, outline it first. There's nothing worse than getting halfway through and realizing you've painted yourself in a plot corner.
Janet Evanovich
#84. Writing fiction is the act of weaving a series of lies to arrive at a greater truth.
Khaled Hosseini
#85. I feel that discussing story-writing in terms of plot, character, and theme is like trying to describe the expression on a face by saying where the eyes, nose, and mouth are.
Flannery O'Connor
#86. I like to be surprised. Fresh implications and plot twists erupt as a story unfolds. Characters develop backgrounds, adding depth and feeling. Writing feels like exploring.
David Brin
#88. I think people got in touch with me either knowing my work, or probably more frequently just knowing a plot or sort of buzz about something I did and sort of saying, "Get that guy that writes the crazy stuff in here."
Mark Leyner
#89. There always had to be a survivor. Maybe this simply spoke to the optimism of the men writing those screenplays; even with an uncomfortable sci fi plot they had to subconsciously comfort themselves by thinking that at least a hundred people would survive.
Someone has to survive
Chris Dietzel
#90. My first attraction to writing novels was the plot, that almost extinct animal. Those novels I read which made me want to be a novelist were long, always plotted, novels - not just Victorian novels, but also those of my New England ancestors: Herman Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne.
John Irving
#91. I thought why not write a kind of mystery, murder, thriller book, but use romance language where the language plays completely against the very dark subject matter, that very strange murderous plot, but use that Harlequin Romance language.
Chuck Palahniuk
#92. Archive material is a fabulous starting point - individual documents are like signposted roads, heading to a variety of intriguing possibilities.
Sara Sheridan
#93. Music, I find, gets you out of a trap [when screenwriting], because it speaks to your emotions directly, it's an abstract thing, it's not concerned with plot or story. And so music really helps - often I'll listen to the music and just write anything, just to get through.
Tony Grisoni
#94. We must remember that there's more than one story and plot in every novel. There are at least as many stories as there are main characters, and each of these stories has to have multiple plots to keep it going - blood and bone, nerve and tissue, forgotten longing and unknown events.
Walter Mosley
#95. If you put Mirabelle into some of the situations she gets into, there is only one way Mirabelle can behave.
Sara Sheridan
#96. A story that has nothing but action and plot is a pretty poor affair; and some great stories have neither.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#97. In 'Pictures from an Institution,' Randall Jarrell was able to transcend the academic novel by simply ignoring it, writing a comedy with no plot at all beyond his own pleasure in language and humanity itself.
Cathleen Schine
#98. By mastering character and plot, you give your book a fighting chance and without
character and plot, no book can survive.
Craig Hart
#99. While every chapter should have goals to further the plot and delve our readers deeper into our world, there must be one goal above all else: Emotional Impact.
A.J. Flowers
#100. Focke's razor: Never attribute to plot holes that which is adequately explained by miracles.
Kevin Focke
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