Kresley Cole Quotes

A good story will keep you wondering about what's happening, what's going on, where does this go? Now it's going to go that way, now it's going to go that way. It has to do that. If it's predictable, it's just boring.

What keeps readers turning pages is suspense, which you can create using a variety of techniques, including tension, pacing and foreshadowing.

I love a good cliffhanger. I love when big events happen in shows. I love shows that aren't afraid to take risks and to really do what's best for the story line and realistic for the story line.

In plotting a book, my goal is to raise the stakes for the characters and, in so doing, keep the reader mesmerized.

I personally love a cliffhanger - I think it just extends the pleasure of viewing.

I love a really good storyline.

Why, for example, do the great writers use anticipation instead of surprise? Because surprise is merely an instrument of the unusual, whereas anticipation of a consequence enlarges our understanding of what is happening.

I better make the plot good. I wanted to make it grip people on the first page and have a big turning point in the middle, as there is, and construct the whole thing like a roller coaster ride.

Nothing bores me more than books where you read two pages and you know exactly how it's going to come out. I want twists and turns that surprise me, characters that have a difficult time and that I don't know if they're going to live or die.

Tension is the cornerstone of any good story.

You run the risk, whenever you build your story around a central mystery, of either letting it go too long, or revealing it too soon and then taking the wind out of the sails of the narrative.

I think predictability is built into any good novel in some way - you begin reading Anna Karenina and you know pretty much what's going to happen at the end. But that doesn't mean you know what's going to happen in the middle. For me, it's that sense of what happens in the middle that's important.

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

The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what fiction means.

Eventually, after the hero and heroine, it is the antagonist who comes with the most anticipation in any film.

I was doing 'Homeland' and read the first two episodes, and all I wanted was episode three to know what would happen next.

What resonates with me whenever I watch a great movie or TV show is the balance of inevitability and unpredictability. And it's a very delicate balance.

There's a lot of similarities, I think, between a thriller and a comedy because it's all about tension. It's about building tension and setups and payoffs and misdirections and surprising people and sort of pushing the boundary.

Suspense is one of the ways you persuade a reader to become engaged and stay engaged with your work.

I love a big, character-rich story with a dark heart, with a compelling mystery or some kind of ticking clock at its center. I want to be lured in by prose, captured by character, and bound by stellar plotting to keep turning the pages.

When you think of a great twist or a red herring or a way of misdirecting the reader, it is good, but you know that they are just tricks at the end of the day, and the way to keep interest is to write characters that people care about.

Judgments and secrets are what make a good novel.

That's how you get surprises, because what movies are all about is surprises.

I get to show the reader the essence of the book without giving anything away.

I believe that the writer should tell a story. I believe in plot. I believe in creating characters and suspense.