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“A beginning is that which does not itself follow anything by causal necessity, but after which something naturally is or comes to be. An end, on the contrary, is that which itself naturally follows some other thing, either by necessity, or as a rule, but has nothing following it. A middle is that which follows something as some other thing follows it. A well constructed plot, therefore, must neither begin nor end at haphazard, but conform to these principles.”
― Aristotle, Poetics

“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.”
― Ansen Dibell, Plot

“The whole magic of a plot requires that somebody be impeded from getting something over with.”
― Renata Adler, Speedboat

“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, The Art of Fiction: Notes on Craft for Young Writers

“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

“I did it thirty-five minutes ago.”
― Alan Moore, Watchmen

“Life is like a story, when all the resolution is resolved, you heave a sigh of relief.”
― Michael Bassey Johnson

“...my novels are like life - I never know where they're going until I get to the end...”
― John Geddes A Familiar Rain

“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

“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.”
― Philip Roth, Operation Shylock: A Confession

“So now you have it. The plot, the whole plot, and nothing but the plot.”
― Elizabeth Peters, Tomb of the Golden Bird

“What monster sleeps in the deep of your story? You need a monster. Without a monster there is no story.”
― Billy Marshall

“You have to have a plot too, you know? Because without it, your life is less of a story and more of an empty paper.”
― Nema Al-Araby

“...you mean you don't fit characters into a plot? excatly...”
― John Geddes A Familiar Rain

“Taken together the Internet reads like the grandest character-driven novel humanity has ever known. Not much plot though.”
― Victor LaValle

“The telling of any character is what they do in a different situation.”
― Sara Sheridan

“Occasionally a particular word or phrase in a letter or diary has sparked an entire plot - like an echo from history, still very alive.”
― Sara Sheridan

“Archive material is a fabulous starting point - individual documents are like signposted roads, heading to a variety of intriguing possibilities.”
― Sara Sheridan

“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, Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offences

“Not telling everything you know is not the same as telling a lie.”
― Glenda Bailey-Mershon, Eve's Garden

“By mastering character and plot, you give your book a fighting chance and without
character and plot, no book can survive.”
― Craig Hart, The Writer's Tune-up Manual: 35 Exercises That Will Scrape the Rust Off Your Writing

“The life of a writer is directed by a mad impulsive muse, that can tell them to cancel all their storyline: a creative divergent devil.”
― Michael Bassey Johnson

“The plot is deceptively simple. Condensed even fur- ther, it might read as a personal ad in some questfinder’s forum: Unlikely hero to save world from cataclysm. Seeks motley assortment of companions. Sidequests guaranteed.”
― Michael P. Williams, Chrono Trigger

“If you put Mirabelle into some of the situations she gets into, there is only one way Mirabelle can behave.”
― Sara Sheridan

“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

“Christ in a Pinata` how have I over complicated the plot?”
― Scott Parker, My Favorite Letter Is H

“Another mistake is presenting too much background information, and doing so in the first few pages. Writers should begin their stories with the event that kicks off the story, and then spoon-feed us background information only when it's needed to understand what's going on."

[A Conversation with Evan Marshall (Writers Write, September 1999)]”
― Evan Marshall

“Is Lavos a selfish conqueror of the world, or a planetary farmer simply following its instincts? How sentient is Lavos, and if it can speak to us, why won’t it? Do apiarists palaver with their bees, or do they just mind the hives and collect the honey? It’s painful to imagine our species as insects, as fodder for something bigger, more powerful. Something that could plummet from above and ruin us in the blink of an eye.”
― Michael P. Williams, Chrono Trigger

“Frog speaks in a “Ye Olde Englishyâ€� dialogue that is as charming as it is grammatically suspect. No one else in 600 AD talks like Frog. Not even Glenn, the boy Frog used to be.”
― Michael P. Williams, Chrono Trigger

“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, Writing Past Dark: Envy, Fear, Distraction and Other Dilemmas in the Writer's Life