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52b7ad3
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When all the details fit in perfectly, something is probably wrong with the story.
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discovery
fiction
mystery
overdetermination
perfection
plot
writing
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Charles Baxter |
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cccd81e
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"I'm trying to undermine the basis of Christian belief... I'm not in the business of offending people. I find the books upholding certain values that I think are important, such as life is immensely valuable and this world is an extraordinarily beautiful place. We should do what we can to increase the amount of wisdom in the world.
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beauty
belief
book
books
children-s-books
offense
paraphrased
philip-pullman
plot
value
wisdom
young-adult
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philip pullman |
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9a31b2e
|
Plot is no more than footprints left in the snow after your characters have run by on their way to incredible destinations.
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plot
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Ray Bradbury |
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d1b7d5e
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Dan, I'm not a Republic serial villain. Do you seriously think I'd explain my master-stroke if there remained the slightest chance of you affecting its outcome? I did it thirty-five minutes ago.
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evil
life
mastermind
ozymandias
plot
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Alan Moore |
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50abdc6
|
You keep waiting for the moral of your life to become obvious, but it never does. Work, work, work: No moral. No plot. No eureka! Just production schedules and days. You might as well be living inside a photocopier. Your lives are all they're ever going to be.
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plot
purpose-of-life
work
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Douglas Coupland |
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8880343
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Story is honorable and trustworthy; plot is shifty, and best kept under house arrest.
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plot
story
writing
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Stephen King |
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cf2b3fb
|
Life is not a plot; it's in the details.
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life
plot
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Jodi Picoult |
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a6bf587
|
Reading a novel after reading semiotic theory was like jogging empty-handed after jogging with hand weights. What exquisite guilt she felt, wickedly enjoying narrative! Madeleine felt safe with a nineteenth century novel. There were going to be people in it. Something was going to happen to them in a place resembling the world. Then too there were lots of weddings in Wharton and Austen. There were all kinds of irresistible gloomy men.
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literary-criticism
literary-theory
narrative
nineteenth-century
novels
plot
postmodernism
reading
semiotics
victorians
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Jeffrey Eugenides |
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c132b7a
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"The principle I always go on in writing a novel is to think of the characters in terms of actors in a play. I say to myself, if a big name were playing this part, and if he found that after a strong first act he had practically nothing to do in the second act, he would walk out. Now, then, can I twist the story so as to give him plenty to do all the way through? I believe the only way a writer can keep himself up to the mark is by examining each story quite coldly before he starts writing it and asking himself it is all right . I mean, once you go saying to yourself, "This is a pretty weak plot as it stands, but if I'm such a hell of a writer that my magic touch will make it okay," you're sunk. If they aren't in interesting situations, characters can't be major characters, not even if you have the rest of the troop talk their heads off about them."
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creative-process
plot
storytelling
writing
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P.G. Wodehouse |
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0e983cb
|
J.R.R.Tolkien has confessed that about a third of the way through The Fellowship of the Ring, some ruffian named Strider confronted the hobbits in an inn, and Tolkien was in despair. He didn't know who Strider was, where the book was going, or what to write next. Strider turns out to be no lesser person than Aragorn, the unrecognized and uncrowned king of all the forces of good, whose restoration to rule is, along with the destruction of the evil ring, the engine that moves the plot of the whole massive trilogy, The Lord of the Rings.
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|
character-building
fiction-writing
lord-of-the-rings
motivation
plot
strider
tolkien
writing-books
|
Ansen Dibell |
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09883db
|
I learned everything I know about plot from Dame Agatha (Christie).
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plot
plotting
|
Connie Willis |
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9ec904f
|
A deus ex machina will never appear in real life so you best make other arrangements.
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|
fiction
life
literature
plan
plot
plot-device
real-life
reality
|
Marisha Pessl |
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1b2043d
|
I did it thirty-five minutes ago.
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|
evil
mastermind
ozymandias
plot
|
Alan Moore |
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a24dc6b
|
So now you have it. The plot, the whole plot, and nothing but the plot.
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|
plot
sethos
writing
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Elizabeth Peters |
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0034852
|
We come up against beauty here -- for the first time in our enquiry: beauty at which a novelist should never aim though he fails if he does not achieve it. I will conduct beauty to her proper place later on. Meanwhile please accept her as part of a completed plot. She looks a little surprised at being there, but beauty ought to look a little surprised: it is the emotion that best suits her face, as Botticelli knew when he painted her risen from the waves, between the winds and the flowers. The beauty who does not look surprised, who accepts her position as her due--she reminds us too much of a prima donna.
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|
botticelli
novel
plot
surprise
|
E.M. Forster |
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4c8c339
|
This is the plot up to the moment when the writer leaves the woman still dolefully enmeshed in it, and, suitcase in hand, tiptoeing so as not to disturb her postcoital rest, he himself slips silently out of the plot on the grounds of its general implausibility, a total lack of gravity, reliance at too many key points on unlikely coincidence, an absence of inner coherence, and not even the most tenuous evidence of anything resembling a serious meaning or purpose. The story so far is frivolously plotted, overplotted, for his taste altogether too freakishly plotted, with outlandish events so wildly careening around every corner that there is nowhere for intelligence to establish a foothold and develop a perspective. As if the look-alike at the story's storm center isn't farfetched enough, there is the capricious loss of the Smilesburger check (there is the fortuitous appearance of the Smilesburger check; there is Louis B. Smilesburger himself, Borscht Belt deus ex machina), which sets the action on its unconvincing course and serves to reinforce the writer's sense that the story has been intentionally conceived as a prank, and a nasty prank at that, considering the struggles of Jewish existence that are said to be at issue by his antagonist.
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plot
plotted
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Philip Roth |
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0561bd9
|
Anyway, you don't know what's going to happen. I'm only just thickening the plot. --I'd say it was pretty thick already. Thick plots are my specialty. If you want a thinner kind, look elsewhere.
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plot
thick-plot
writing
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Margaret Atwood |
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4753e09
|
I struggled with a nebulous work which seemed now a , now a vast novel, wherein a hero not unlike myself pursued, amid ghostly incidents, a series of reflections about life and art.
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iris-murdoch
meta
plot
struggling
the-black-prince
writer
writing
|
Iris Murdoch |
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b990d96
|
Of course, opera has plot - and I was already anticipating all those unknown stories I was about to discover - but its main function is to deliver the characters as swiftly as possible to the point where thet can sing of their deepest emotions. Opera cuts to the chase - as death does. So now, contented indifference before Middlesbrough against Slovan Bratislava coexisted with a craving for an art in which violent, overwhelming, hysterical and destructive emotion was the norme; an art which seeks, more obviously than any other form, to break your heart.
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|
loss
opera
plot
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Julian Barnes |