Mark Mapstone > Mark's Quotes

“The conflict between how we wish to be perceived and what we really feel is at the root of all character.”
― John Yorke, Into the Woods: A Five Act Journey Into Story

“Great characters are consciously or subconsciously at war with themselves.”
― John Yorke, Into the Woods: A Five Act Journey Into Story

“A character’s want is a superficial conscious desire for the thing they think they need in order to present themselves to the world, a”
― John Yorke, Into The Woods: How Stories Work and Why We Tell Them

“People construct a public face in order to deal with the conflicts that rage inside them.”
― John Yorke, Into the Woods: A Five Act Journey Into Story

“A character’s façade, then, is an outer manifestation of an inner conflict.”
― John Yorke, Into the Woods: A Five Act Journey Into Story

“Exposition, after all, is telling and drama is showing.”
― John Yorke, Into the Woods: A Five Act Journey Into Story

“All good exposition is disguised by making it dramatic – by injecting conflict.”
― John Yorke, Into the Woods: A Five Act Journey Into Story

“The greater the conflict, the less visible the exposition.”
― John Yorke, Into the Woods: A Five Act Journey Into Story

“if you disguise exposition with ‘emotional overlay’, it’s rendered undetectable.”
― John Yorke, Into the Woods: A Five Act Journey Into Story

“Silence of the Lambs screenwriter Ted Tally put the art of writing dialogue succinctly: ‘What’s important is not the emotion they’re playing but the emotion they’re trying to conceal.”
― John Yorke, Into The Woods: How Stories Work and Why We Tell Them

“If you have any characters that you want to do seemingly unrealistic things, things that feel too much like pushing the boundaries of reality, then bend reality so that they have NO CHOICE but to do that impossible action.”
― Michael Milton, Short Story: From First Draft to Final Product

“Q: What’s the key to suspense? A: I’ll tell you later.”
― Benjamin Percy, Thrill Me: Essays on Fiction

“When you let the camera linger, when you crowd a scene with details, you are announcing that everything is important, and if you do this constantly, then you are also saying that everything is important, and when everything is important, nothing is important.”
― Benjamin Percy, Thrill Me: Essays on Fiction

“Plot is no more than footprints left in the snow after your characters have run by on their way to incredible destinations.”
― Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing: Releasing the Creative Genius Within You

“It’s cause and effect, Vernon,”
― D.B.C. Pierre, Vernon God Little : a 21st century comedy in the presence of death

“A-B-D-C-E structure of a story, an acronym for Action-Background-Development-Conflict-Ending.”
― Benjamin Percy, Thrill Me: Essays on Fiction

“CHARACTER background and language filtered through the AUTHOR’S heart, and rendered with craft on the PAGE = VOICE”
― James Scott Bell, Voice: The Secret Power of Great Writing

“Lester Dent’s Master Fiction Plot One of the most successful of the pulp writers was Lester Dent (1904-1959). In his relatively short life he churned out at least 175 novels, most of them about the titular character Doc Savage”
― James Scott Bell, How to Write Pulp Fiction

“The world we experience as ‘out there’ is actually a reconstruction of reality that is built inside our heads. It’s an act of creation by the storytelling brain. This is how it works. You walk into a room. Your brain predicts what the scene should look and sound and feel like, then it generates a hallucination based on these predictions. It’s this hallucination that you experience as the world around you. It’s this hallucination you exist at the centre of, every minute of every day. You’ll never experience actual reality because you have no direct access to it.”
― Will Storr, The Science of Storytelling

“We have our moment of origin damage and the belief about the world that it created. In this next step, the character needs to see powerful evidence that their belief is correct.”
― Will Storr, The Science of Storytelling

“at the start of the novel, your hero is resistant to change. They hear the theme stated and they go, “What the heck does he know? He doesn’t know me.”
― Jessica Brody, Save the Cat! Writes a Novel

“Act 2 is the opposite of Act 1. If Act 1 is the thesis—the status quo world—then Act 2 is the upside-down version of that. The polar opposite. The inverse. The antithesis.”
― Jessica Brody, Save the Cat! Writes a Novel

“And this is what I love about the Theme Stated. The hero often ignores it!”
― Jessica Brody, Save the Cat! Writes a Novel

“That’s why I like to call Act 2 fixing things the wrong way.”
― Jessica Brody, Save the Cat! Writes a Novel

“They must in some way represent the upside-down Act 2 world. They must in some way help guide the hero toward their life lesson or theme.”
― Jessica Brody, Save the Cat! Writes a Novel

“In all of these Midpoint examples, you might have noticed a subtle shift from wants to needs. This is no coincidence. The third essential Midpoint element is the intersection of the A and B stories, when your hero starts to let go of what they want in lieu of figuring out what they need.”
― Jessica Brody, Save the Cat! Writes a Novel

“If the Break Into 2 was the hero figuring out how to fix things the wrong way, then the Break Into 3 is when the hero finally figures out how to fix things the right way.”
― Jessica Brody, Save the Cat! Writes a Novel

“THE SAVE THE CAT! LOGLINE TEMPLATE On the verge of a stasis = death moment, a flawed hero Breaks Into 2; but when the Midpoint happens, they must learn the Theme Stated before the All Is Lost.”
― Jessica Brody, Save the Cat! Writes a Novel

“THE SAVE THE CAT! SHORT SYNOPSIS TEMPLATE PARAGRAPH 1: Setup, flawed hero, and Catalyst (2–4 sentences) PARAGRAPH 2: Break Into 2 and/or Fun and Games (2–4 sentences) PARAGRAPH 3: Theme Stated, Midpoint hint and/or All Is Lost hint, ending in a cliffhanger (1 to 3 sentences)”
― Jessica Brody, Save the Cat! Writes a Novel

“The man went back to reading the news on the screen: ‘Three arrested for virus violation’ … ‘PM hosts Allied Security Talks’, Jake read.”
― Fiona Shaw, Outwalkers