Scarlett Thomas Quotes

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

It's always good to have a story arch.

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.

Plots may be simple or complex, but suspense, and climactic progress from one incident to another, are essential. Every incident in a fictional work should have some bearing on the climax or denouement, and any denouement which is not the inevitable result of the preceding incidents is awkward and unliterary.

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.

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.

I began to be impressed by what made a good book-how you needed to have a sensible story, a plot that developed, with a beginning, a middle, and an end that would tie everything together.

Good stories are driven by conflict, tension, and high stakes.

An action movie should, like any other, follow the narrative traditions of literature. That means there should be subtlety, a slow build and a gradual bringing together of all the separate threads of the plot. To see all of it coming together slowly is very rewarding for the audience.

What I do is put my characters into situations that are so precarious there is no way to get out. And then I figure how to get them out.

If you have a beautiful story, it has to have conflict. If you don't have conflict, it can't be a good story.

The nice thing about a series is you can end on cliffhangers all the time. You can be like, 'You know what? Here we go, this person just died, end of book.' And with the end of the series, you're very conscious of all the plotlines that were left hanging. There's a balance there to wrap those up but still leave it exciting.

That is what I define as a novel: something that has a beginning, a middle and an end, with characters and a plot that sustain interest from the first sentence to the last. But that is not what I do at all.

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

A novel requires a certain kind of world-building and also a certain kind of closure, ultimately. Whereas with a short story you have this sense that there are hinges that the reader doesn't see.

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

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.

You have an hour and a half or two hours - maybe two and a half hours - in a movie, and it has to be a self-contained three-act structure. It's like a rock and roll song. Certain things have to happen for it to be a toe-tapper and get people excited, leaving the theater.

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

In a crime novel, if you are going to have a big revelation in chapter 30, you have to plant the information in chapters three and 11.

As a writer, I try to appeal to the 'elusive boy audience' the same way I try to appeal to everyone: I do the very best I can to create interesting characters, addictive plots, tons of conflict, believable settings, unexpected plot twists, intriguing beginnings, and satisfying endings.

My conception of it was that in a normal film you have a story with different movements that program, develop, go a little bit off the trunk, come back, and end.

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

I love a really good storyline.

A story really isn't truly a story until it reaches its climax and conclusion.