Nicholas Mosley Quotes

When you're telling taut, tight storytelling that has any kind of built-in plot twist elements, you tend to want to stack everything up on top of itself as opposed to letting things breathe and be languid in terms of the passage of time.

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.

A good story will keep you wondering about what's happening, what's going on, where does this go? Now it's going to go that way, now it's going to go that way. It has to do that. If it's predictable, it's just boring.

I mean suspense, twists are almost impossible these days.

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

I believe thrillers work if the story is good. It is not easy to make a thriller because the audience is making their own story in their minds as they watch the film. You have to break that expectation and still make them like the film.

I love a big, character-rich story with a dark heart, with a compelling mystery or some kind of ticking clock at its center. I want to be lured in by prose, captured by character, and bound by stellar plotting to keep turning the pages.

Really good books need a chaos element: something weird or inexplicable.

In a novel you have to resist the urge to tell everything.

Pace, like everything else in writing, involves a trade-off. If you're not offering the reader a lot of action to keep her interested, you must offer something else in its stead. Slow pace is ideal for complex character development, detailed description, and nuances of style.

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.

I started as a playwright. Any sort of scriptwriting you do helps you hone your story. You have the same demands of creating a plot, developing relatable characters and keeping your audience invested in your story. My books are basically structured like three-act plays.

A story to me means a plot where there is some surprise. Because that is how life is - full of surprises.

I'm not a fan of endless mystery in storytelling - I like to know where the mythology's going; I like to get there in an exciting, fast-paced way - enough that there's a really clear, aggressive direction to where it's going, to pay off mystery and reward the audiences loyalty.

Network television is all talk. I think there should be visuals on a show, some sense of mystery to it, connections that don't add up.

You just never know what the grand plan is on 'Dexter,' so I didn't know if I was going to make it to the next episode, let alone the next season!

On a TV show, you don't know where the character is going.

In the theatre the audience wants to be surprised - but by things that they expect.

With a horror movie, you don't want to anticipate where things are going to go.

When I see an image in my head that compels me, where there's this mystery about what's going to happen next or could happen next, I'll be intrigued. There are so many scripts that you read, and you know exactly what's going to happen, and there aren't too many where you can't tell within the first 20 pages where it's going.

I like the idea of shows where I don't know where I'll be at the end of the season.

The surprise with which a detective novel concludes should set up tragic vibrations which run backward through the entire structure.

I believe in plot, in development of character, in the effect of the passage of time, in a good story - better than something you might find in the newspaper. And I believe a novel should be as complicated and involved as you're capable of making it.

Suspense is very important. Even though this is humor and they're short stories, that theory of building suspense is still there.

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