Ruth Rendell Quotes

For me, the worst writing generally just 'flips' things: this person's really a traitor; it was all a dream; etc. Nothing is so ruinous as a forced 'twist,' I think.

It may sound surprising, but a joke and a crime novel work in very much the same way. The comedian/writer leads their audience along the garden path. The audience know what's coming, or at least they think they do until they get hit from a direction they were not expecting.

Well you know, the big trick with 'Saw,' the sleight of hand that you have to pull off is that - spoiler alert - the bad guy, the antagonist, is right there in front of your face, literally.

My writing has always been what you call 'narrative fiction' in the sense that it's got very strong plots and twists at the end.

I have never been able to read Agatha Christie - the pleasure is purely in the puzzle, and the reader is toyed with by someone who didn't decide herself who the killer was until the end of the writing.

With a thriller, you're going to have your red herrings, as different suspects are thrown up as possible culprits. You can only explore that for so long - if you do that more than a few times, it starts to get a little redundant.

It's funny: I like being surprised as a reader, so it's difficult for me to spoil my own stuff.

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

I'm so tired of stories starting, 'Maud Jones was walking her dog down Broadway.' You've got to go over to the back page somewhere to finally find out the damn dog was run over by a truck. Get the thing told, for heaven's sake. Everybody doesn't have to be an O. Henry.

In film, because you know where the ending is, characters can change, but in television, you substitute revelation for change, and that can be hard to pull off.

The writers keep managing to turn the show in on itself, coming up with something that's well thought-out and miraculous.

When you write fiction, you have an ideal reader in your mind who's sort of you but smarter.

The first lie of fiction is that the author gives some order to the chaos of life: chronological order, or whatever order the author chooses.

Sometimes, I have themes that interest me or that touch on larger issues but, really, I'm just trying to figure out the plot, or how the characters work. I'm trying to make the best story I possibly can.

I always think plot is what you fall back on if you can't write, to keep things going.

What makes a story a story is that something changes. Internal, external, small or large, trivial or of earth-shattering importance. Doesn't matter.

You can throw a novel into focus with one overheard line.

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

The writer is always tricking the reader into listening to their dream.

When the reader and one narrator know something the other narrator does not, the opportunities for suspense and plot development and the shifting of reader sympathies get really interesting.

It was quite risky to open the book with one of my quieter stories; I'm kind of trying, I think, to lure readers into a false sense of security and then assault them with a couple really loud, really strange stories.

As a novelist, you could say that I am dreaming while I am awake, and every day I can continue with yesterday's dream. Because it is a dream, there are so many contradictions and I have to adjust them to make the story work. But, in principle, the original dream does not change.

The laws of literary creation are unique; they don't change, and they are the same for everyone everywhere. I mean that you can tell a story that covers three hours of human life or three centuries - it comes to the same thing. Each writer who creates something authentic in a natural way instinctively also creates the technique that suits him.

Marc Cherry is so good at writing himself into a corner, then writing himself out of that corner. It's really fun to watch that.

When I was nine years old, I wrote a short story called 'How to Build a Snowman,' from which no practical snowperson-crafting techniques could be gleaned. The story was an assignment for class and it featured a series of careful but meaningless instructions. Of course, the building of the snowman was a red herring.