Sandra Brown Quotes

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

Of course, I'm being rude. I'm spoiling the ending, not only of the entire book, but of this particular piece of it. I have given you two events in advance, because I don't have much interest in building mystery. Mystery bores me. It chores me. I know what happens and so do you. It's the machinations that wheel us there that aggravate, perplex, interest, and astound me. There are many things to think of. There is much story.

In episodic TV you have to keep things secret to keep the viewer in suspense.

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.

Dramatically it's always more interesting to conceal rather than reveal things.

There are secrets at the heart of every story; there is something that must be uncovered or discovered, both by the reader and by the characters.

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

One of the greatest sins in any story is false suspense. The kind of 'suspense' that disintegrates the moment you give your reader one second to think about it. And it's an easy trap to fall into, so watch carefully for it. If your story hinges on the question, 'Will Superman be pushed so far in his battle against Lex Luthor that he'll have to kill him?', or if your big cliffhanger moment is, 'Wow, is Spider-Man really dead this time?', then I understand Food Lion is hiring.

Narrative tension is primarily about withholding information.

One feels the excitement of hearing an untold story.

I would say that all short stories have mystery naturally built into them.

I've always loved mysteries, the something there that you didn't know, and with 'Case Histories' I just decide to make that more up-front.

I write in expectation that readers want to participate in a kind of two-sided game: They are trying to guess what I am up to - what the story's up to - and I'm giving them clues and matter to keep them interested without giving everything away at the start. Even the rules, if any, of the game are for the reader to discover.

I am very lucky that I get to tell stories for a living. I love being able to grab people's attention, to keep them turning the pages, to make them stay awake all night. I want to stir the pulse, yes, but also to stir the heart. I hope 'The Woods' does that.

That's what a good crime novelist - any good novelist - should do with you: play with your perceptions while showing you everything in plain sight.

Considerations of plot do a great deal of heavy lifting when it comes to long-form narrative - readers will overlook the most ham-fisted prose if only a writer can make them long to know what happens next.

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.

Every story needs an element of suspense - or it's lousy.

I like thrillers a lot. There's a lot of discipline connected to them. You can't be as freewheeling as you are with character pieces.

There is nothing better than a really cool mystery: you don't know what's going to happen, so you keep turning those pages or watching that series.

If you can't figure out how to make the beginning of your book compelling, you're probably not writing a compelling book.

When you're watching a Hitchcock movie, you, for most of the movie, are playing the guessing game. What's the endgame? What's the plot? How are these people involved? It's the best way to tell the story, and as a viewer, that's what you want to experience.

A thriller needs to hold the interest of the reader from the very beginning. It needs to engage with them, hold them in rapt attention, and prevent them from putting down the book.

I love writing thrillers.

There are other ways to create tension and drama than to have somebody stabbed through the back with a sword.