Ira Sachs Quotes

With thrillers, I tend to concentrate on the research and pace more than the characters.

We need the villain sometimes. It makes for an interesting story.

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

Listen to great storytellers; slowly, you will learn about voice, timing, tension, structure, climax - all the things you need to tell stories that will capture the imagination of your audience.

Tension is the cornerstone of any good story.

The way I express ideas is through the plot, Suspense is an important part of expressing an idea.

No matter how hard we strive for objectivity, writers are biased toward tension - those moments in which character is forged and revealed.

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.

With any good story, you need the adversary, the heroes and villains. You need a good mixture to make it work.

You won't have a story unless you have conflict, which means if there's no conflict in a situation, people look for a way to make some.

Good drama must be drastic.

In older science fiction stories, they had to rely on storytelling as opposed to spectacle. The old run of the 'Twilight Zone,' the star was the writing and the storytelling, and the characters and the twists and the cleverness in the setup and payoff and execution.

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.

It was unpredictable, good storytelling that brought you back each week.

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.

Judgments and secrets are what make a good novel.

All fiction is about people, unless it's about rabbits pretending to be people. It's all essentially characters in action, which means characters moving through time and changes taking place, and that's what we call 'the plot'.

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.

Anybody who sits down to write, and they think 'thriller,' maybe shouldn't be thinking that way. Maybe we should be thinking 'novel,' maybe 'thriller' way in the background, but that these are real people to whom things are happening. It just happens to be a hell of an exciting story.

The villain of any story is often the most compelling character.

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

Fiction demands structures and recognizable shapes. Big surprises only draw attention to the writer's hand.

To answer that I have to describe what I think is my responsibility as a thriller writer: To give my readers the most exciting roller coaster ride of a suspense story I can possibly think of.

I think mystery writers and thriller writers - whatever genre you want to call it - are taking on some of the biggest, most interesting kind of socioeconomic issues around in a really interesting, compelling way.

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