Tracy Chevalier Quotes

I want the reader to turn the page and keep on turning until the end.

People want to find out what happens to the characters, and want to keep reading, and turning the pages.

Everything's always about page-turning, right? What's next? So, if you create questions for audiences, then they'll want to know the answer. Or they begin to formulate possible outcomes. That's the game we play when we're hearing a story unfold. That's part of what sucks us into a movie.

Suspense is my thing. I think I am able to make people want to keep turning pages. They want to know what happens. So I can do that.

For me, the writing process is the same as the reading process. I want to know what happens next.

I believe the most important thing you can do in any kind of novel is to make your reader want to go on with it and want to know what happens next.

I try to end every chapter with an air of suspense. I try to leave the reader wanting to turn the page.

Will the reader turn the page?

We are all like Scheherazade's husband, in that we want to know what happens next.

In a book, you can kind of take time and have lulls in places.

There is hardly a person alive who does not want to know 'what happened next,' in any context.

One of my greatest pleasures is falling into a story someone else has written.

I love character and voice, and my favourite books have been the ones in which I've become completely absorbed.

Each book will have a lot of cliffhangers, because I like that.

Sometimes television can just jump from one bit of plot to the next, and the words fill in the in-between.

One of the things I learned as a young semiotics nerd was that if you have plot moving forward, no matter how banal the facts of it, simply the fact that the plot is rolling forward makes you wonder what's going to happen next, which creates suspense. So you can control peoples' attention simply by having things move forward in a story.

Once I opened a book, I felt compelled to finish it. I was drawn into a world, and I had to know what would happen, how it would end.

When I see an image in my head that compels me, where there's this mystery about what's going to happen next or could happen next, I'll be intrigued. There are so many scripts that you read, and you know exactly what's going to happen, and there aren't too many where you can't tell within the first 20 pages where it's going.

I want readers turning pages until three o'clock in the morning. I want the themes of books to stick around for a reader. I'm always trying to find a way to balance characters and theme.

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.

When I start any book, I have no idea what I'm going to do.

Suspense is my thing. I think I am able to make people want to keep turning pages. They want to know what happens.

I subscribe to the theory that reading a book is similar to walking a trail, and I'm most comfortable walking when I can see where I'm going and where I've been. When I'm reading a printed book, the weight of the pages I've turned gives me a sense of how far I've come.

Whenever I start a book, I swear it's going to be a short one. But then it's, 'Who was his grandfather? And how did he get there in the first place? And what kind of animals is he chasing?'

I don't like twists. I don't get much out of them. If you know two cars are about to run into each other, you don't walk away and say, 'Oh, I know what's going to happen.' You watch.