Darin Strauss Quotes

I'm here to get the story on to the page. It would be good to catch your attention, and I have to make you want to read on, and I suppose I prefer you don't actually think about the 'how' at all - the writing technique, the 'style', or even who it is that's putting this together.

Possibly because I did start off as a journalist, my starting point has always been that you've got to keep an audience with you. Whatever you're doing, you always want a script to be a page-turner. It's very important never, ever, to feel above that.

Crassly put: When I write, I am trying not to bore myself and my readers.

I made a deliberate choice to write something people would enjoy, not knock people out with 'Boy, he can really put a clause together!'

To just tell a story from beginning, middle and end doesn't motivate me that much.

I went to a seminar early in my career on the craft of storytelling by Robert McKee. It was really life altering. There are basic principles on how to craft an engaging story and he covers them well. He's got a book out, 'Story,' that I would highly recommend to anyone interested in improve their storytelling.

There is commerciality in storytelling, even in a film or a piece of literature. These things exist. That's why stories came to be: to hold attention and, while you're not looking, you'll get hopefully some nutritional value that the author has been working up. That's narrative; that's passing stuff down.

The marketplace tells us that good, visceral storytelling has a place. But there are lots of questions about the format that stories take.

I think that whenever a book is not a challenge, I'm telling the wrong story.

I think that you have to keep the reader front and centre if you're going to write something that people are going to love and be entertained by.

You can't visit readers where you think they are. You have to invite them home to where you are and try to lure them into your universe. That's the art of storytelling.

Anyone who tries to write a memoir needs to keep in mind that what's interesting to you isn't necessarily interesting to a reader.

The marketability, the success of a book, ultimately rests with whether or not people will find the concept/characters/title/cover appealing.

If we as writers could predict what readers grab on to, we would write it.

I don't know if anything I write will endure, but I do try to write it as a narrative that will not only challenge but also entice the reader into the lives of children.

In the end, my reasons for moving down the timeline and introducing a new cast have more to do with keeping myself entertained, on the assumption that if I get bored, my readers are going to be even more bored.

I always know exactly where my stories take place, which gives me something certain so I can use my imagination for the other stuff. I worry though, who wants to keep reading stories about Kalamazoo?

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

I think that if you are a serious writer, you are almost obligated to provide the intelligent average reader with something that they can relate to and care about. If you are writing only for a tiny elite, then that surely should sound alarm bells.

Writers are in the entertainment business, and it gives me lots of pleasure to entertain my readers.

The trick to writing for people is, you have to be able to turn them on in your head. And know how they'd word something or how they'd inflect it.

It has always been something I could do, and it may seem odd that in my case I seem to create an interesting narrative and frustrate the reader's opportunities to follow it at every step.

Ordering is difficult. It's like arranging pieces of music in a concert: What do you put first? What do you put after the intermission? I want the reader to be sort of surprised, to come to each story freshly.

The things I write about are completely removed from my own life, but people want to know the characters better.

But I care about the reader, and I'm trying to keep the reader's attention for as long as I can.