Barbara Tuchman Quotes

As a reader, I happen to like turning pages and wanting to know what happens next.

I try to end every chapter with an air of suspense. I try to leave the reader wanting to turn the page.

Will the reader turn the page?

Once I opened a book, I felt compelled to finish it. I was drawn into a world, and I had to know what would happen, how it would end.

I believe the most important thing you can do in any kind of novel is to make your reader want to go on with it and want to know what happens next.

We are all like Scheherazade's husband, in that we want to know what happens next.

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

I like to believe that if you pay close attention to the sentences as they unfold, they will draw you in rather than pushing you away.

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.

Long intros are cool because there's a little bit of anticipation, you know?

People want to find out what happens to the characters, and want to keep reading, and turning the pages.

I'm writing for my ideal reader, for somebody who's willing to take the time, who's willing to get lost in a new world, who's willing to do their part. But then I have to do my part and give them a sound and a voice that they believe in enough to keep going.

I write for the same reason I read: to find out what's going to happen.

For me, the writing process is the same as the reading process. I want 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.

It takes two guys to tell a story, paint a picture, so our audience can be entertained and brought into the match. You need to suck people in emotionally to a match, and it takes both parties to paint that picture.

There is hardly a person alive who does not want to know 'what happened next,' in any context.

I completely hold on to the idea that people are eager if not desperate to be told a good story.

Spoilers are cowardly. They're just people who want to anesthetize themselves against the tension and the experience that the director and the artist have set up. If you go in there knowing what's going to happen, it's like reading the last page of the book. It's just cowardly.

But, you have to watch them in order. That's very important because, as it turns out, stories have to be told in order. It's like reading a novel. There are times when it's tiring. And then, you get hooked and it's a page-turner, and you really want to keep reading. I do think there will be some fatigue that sets in.

If you're telling a story it's always best not to play the ending.

You know, we love stories and we love narrative; we love to get lost in an author's world.

Stories have a special way of putting us inside the people, inside the boots of the soldiers. You're absorbed in a way a documentary or nonfiction can't do for you.

Audiences like to be challenged and to be actively involved and try to guess an outcome.

I went back to the notion of story, which is always a good thing to have if you're trying to get people to pay attention to a book and pick up information along the way.