Jed Mercurio Quotes

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

In love stories you have to establish the mood and then you can go on. Writing thrillers are difficult because every scene needs a twist. May be comedy is even more difficult but I have no experience of it.

I always wanted to write a book. Not a romance novel. Maybe a crime thriller. Something with action. Maybe that will happen some day.

All the writing elements are the same. You need to tell a good story... You've got good characters... People think there's some dramatic difference between writing 'Little Bear' and the 'Hunger Games,' and as a writer, for me, there isn't.

Before you can write a novel you have to have a number of ideas that come together. One idea is not enough.

A good story cannot be devised; it has to be distilled.

The way to write a thriller is to ask a question at the beginning, and answer it at the end.

Much of the time in the writer's room is spent working on story, and I was always challenging myself to make it more interesting, tighter and more surprising: to come at it sideways in a way that the audience wasn't expecting.

One has to be very selective about what is essential for driving the story and what isn't. You leave out some things that are lovely, but unfortunately it is necessary.

I write in a pretty straightforward way. I kind of sit down at page one and start writing.

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

Language description and metaphors seem readily available. The things I have to work harder at are plot, pacing, and form.

I would say that all short stories have mystery naturally built into them.

The things that converge in the writing of a play come from a complex of motives, a genesis shrouded in a certain kind of mystery.

In fiction, you learn about pacing and how to build tension - which is something you want in a really good nonfiction feature article as well.

When I'm writing a story, I try to reduce it to the barest possible components and go from there.

The short story is a very natural mode of storytelling; most stories can be told quickly. I always think of them as like a tightrope walk - every sentence is a step along the rope, and you can so easily misplace your step and break your neck.

As far as personal philosophies go, I think you should know your ending. I know that's radically different from a lot of other writers who just organically like to find the story. Other than that, I try different things and mess around. I'm still just playing a good bit.

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

An attempt to write nothing but characterization will soon bog down; I for one don't want to have somebody tell me about someone else.

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.

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.

I write short stories. I write every day.

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.

All fiction relies on the real world in the sense that we all take in the world through our five senses and we accumulate details, consciously or subconsciously. This accumulation of detail can be drawn on when you write fiction.