Lee Child Quotes

For me a thriller is a very carefully structured story.

One of the wonderful things about 'Power' and why fans often say it makes their heart race is it's set up like a horror film because the audience is, like, four or five steps ahead of the characters.

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

The thriller is not a recent invention. It probably goes back to the dawn of storytelling.

A story really isn't truly a story until it reaches its climax and conclusion.

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

A good writer can set a thriller anywhere and make it convincing: the trick is to evoke the setting in such a way that it highlights the crime or unsettles the reader.

You run the risk, whenever you build your story around a central mystery, of either letting it go too long, or revealing it too soon and then taking the wind out of the sails of the narrative.

Every story needs an element of suspense - or it's lousy.

I love writing thrillers.

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.

The things I discovered when writing 'Line of Duty' were the tools you have available to write a thriller.

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.

I think suspense is a big thing.

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.

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

The most difficult part of any crime novel is the plotting. It all begins simply enough, but soon you're dealing with a multitude of linked characters, strands, themes and red herrings - and you need to try to control these unruly elements and weave them into a pattern.

If you are writing a thriller with violence in it, the ending must be violent. You are delivering a promise to your reader.

Why, for example, do the great writers use anticipation instead of surprise? Because surprise is merely an instrument of the unusual, whereas anticipation of a consequence enlarges our understanding of what is happening.

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.

Sometimes, you don't realize that something is actually a sidetrack for the story, or it takes the tension out of a scene.

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.

Suspense is my thing. I think I am able to make people want to keep turning pages. They want to know what happens.

I like thrillers a lot. There's a lot of discipline connected to them. You can't be as freewheeling as you are with character pieces.

If you're going to write thrillers, you have to make a decision if you are going to be realistic or go off and over.