Chris Claremont Quotes

I think the tricky balance, the most important thing more than the horror is to have a compelling story, compelling drama, a show about great characters that you care about and you want to come back every week to see what they're up to.

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.

Fiction works when it makes a reader feel something strongly.

I've found I can plunge the characters into whatever absurd, awful situation, and readers will follow as long as the writer makes them seem like 'real people.'

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 think it's very easy to disgust the reader with violence on the page - that's incredibly easy - but it's far harder to make a reader care about a character.

I believe that if the story is fleshed out and the characters more believable, the reader is more likely to take the journey with them. In addition, the plot can be more complex. My characters are very real to me, and I want each of my characters to be different.

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

I like making stories and characters that people can relate to. I also like giving the audience a departure from whatever they're thinking about in their life and enjoying a show or a movie.

Well, for people who want to write best sellers, the best advice I can give is to say that the novel has to engage the reader emotionally.

These people are real to me, and situations keep coming up where their emergence feels natural. It's like meeting old friends. I hope readers feel the same way.

Serial novels have an unexpected effect; they hook the writer as well as the reader.

If you don't have people that the reader cares about and stories that are gripping, you've got nothing.

I can relate to historical characters or imaginary ones. It doesn't matter if a story takes place in the future or in the present, as long as the story is compelling.

You've either got to find a way to make your continuing characters insteresting without making them maudlin or overwrought, or you've got to put more emphasis on the suspects.

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.

What I find frustrating about scripted television is that it's rare that you are surprised by how you feel about the character, or how you feel about the show.

When you write stories linking reality to a big storyline, people relate to it better.

People love storylines. They love them because at some point, the talent will get people emotionally invested.

I do like books to be quite an intense experience, and that's the kind of novel I respond to as a reader.

What I have learned from working on those great shows is what is the DNA that makes them so deeply involving and interesting for an audience over a long period of time. So much has to do with character, complexity, and sophistication.

I loved writing 'Lost.' It was like a never-ending opera, in a way.

You can make a beautiful, airtight world that's fascinating to look at, but it's not interesting unless you have a character that's trying to achieve something under the circumstances of that world. It's harder to play a wacky girlfriend whose journey you just don't understand.

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.