Robert J. Sawyer Quotes

My crime novels are highly structured. I never start out with a dead body. I start with an impossible scenario. Opening questions should be mysterious, weird, intriguing, and contain the seeds of the solution. The structure has to be meticulous - I'm a structure freak.

When I was writing 'The Luminaries,' I read a lot of crime novels because I wanted to figure out which ones made me go, 'Ah! I didn't know that was coming!'

There are a lot of shows that have secrets and string people along and use the secrets of the narrative engine to keep people coming back every week. I don't know if those programs even have an answer. I don't know how they build their shows.

It's a challenge to turn a book series into a television series; you need to keep people on their toes, but you also want to be true to the source material.

As a kid, I always loved serialized books. It's the reason why people love 'Harry Potter.' Serialization is amazing. It works in television. It works in film and it works in books. Especially when you're a young kid, you get attached to these characters.

There certainly does seem a possibility that the detective story will come to an end, simply because the public will have learnt all the tricks.

The suspense of a novel is not only in the reader, but in the novelist, who is intensely curious about what will happen to the hero.

I think the context of an hour-long drama gives breathing space that you don't get in a film.

What I took away from my 'Flashforward' experience is that when you're doing a serialized mythology show, you put your foot on the gas, and you do not take it off.

Anyone who was tempted to draw comparisons between my father's 'Dave Robicheaux' series and my first book quickly gave up.

You can watch any episode you want and have a compelling story being told.

I spent the first twenty years of my writing career preparing for the mystery genre, which is my favorite literary form.

Narrativity presumes a special taste for plot. And this taste for plot was always very present in the Anglo-Saxon countries and that explains their high quality of detective novels.

Mysteries I read for fun, so I will probably never write one, for fear of spoiling the fun.

Most detective story readers are an educated audience and know there are only a certain number of plots. The interest lies in what the writer does with them.

I like to believe my suspense novels marry the strong characters from my romance writing past, with the twisty, clever plots of my mystery writing present.

The 13-episode model lends itself to a more serialised format, which is nice and gives writers a chance to breathe some space into it.

I have great respect for daytime drama. I love the branding. I love the style. What can I say? I love good soap!

Delaying and withholding tactics, red herrings, partial and doubtful outcomes are stock in trade for fiction writers, especially crime writers.

I often will write a scene from three different points of view to find out which has the most tension and which way I'm able to conceal the information I'm trying to conceal. And that is, at the end of the day, what writing suspense is all about.

For me, as an audience member, I'm always most engaged by serialized storytelling, so as an actor, the thing that I take away from it is how much fun it is to perform a serialized story.

The first time I read a crime novel - I think it may have been an Elmore Leonard book - it took some time for me to realise how the genre worked. There were about 20 characters on the first page, and I wasn't used to this. I started to enjoy it when I saw that was how crime books worked.

When I'm writing, I won't know whodunnit until maybe two thirds of the way through. Until then, I know as little as my detective. I just make it up as I go along. It's nerve-wracking, actually. You'll be half through and not know your conclusion. You worry one of these days the ending won't come. I'll be left with only two-thirds of a novel.

Six books after the surprises of 'Full Dark House,' the Bryant and May novels continue to stay within the bounds of formula by straining against them in new ways.

You don't want to write the same story again, but people are like 'We want the same story but different.' Well, how do you do that?