Brian P. Cleary Quotes

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 love a really good storyline.

Without going into too much detail, the end of my major action scene, after the climax of the scene, there was one little change that I suggested regarding the way things should turn out. It was in the detail of the tears of blood.

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

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.

Stories are as unique as the people who tell them, and the best stories are in which the ending is a surprise.

Withholding things in a story is no good if you aren't building to something substantial. It becomes foreplay without the main event, and no one wants that.

I was happy enough; I knew that during the night the whole city might go up in flames and all its people be killed, but the ravines, houses, and footpaths would wake in the morning calm and unchanged.

A witty illustration or an apt story will accomplish more than columns of argument.

The most attractive characteristic in a person is the story they are telling the world. We stop and stare at stories.

The first thing we see about a short story is its mystery. And in the best short stories, we return at the last to see mystery again

Sometimes if you've got a story that's interesting enough, you don't need to pour sugar on ice cream. The ice cream is great.

Have a short story feature two situations, and then let them solve each other.

Where there's a will there's a detective story.

As a writer I'm essentially just trying to impersonate a first-time reader, who picks up the story and has to decide, at every point, whether to keep going.

That night it felt that somehow by flicking them off the roof, the matches would burn down everything, the sparks from the tips of the flames, torching the world and all the heartbroken people in it.

So you want to hear a story? Well, I used to know a whole lot of pretty interesting ones. Some of them so funny you'd laugh yourself unconscious, others so terrible you'd never want to repeat them. But I can't remember any of those. So I'll just tell you about the time I found that lost thing.

Fire is fed by fire. The same small flame destroys Two stalks of wheat at once.

There's a rule for what makes good fantasy work, and it's as strange as any riddle ever posed in a fairy tale: In fantasy, you can do anything; and therefore, the one thing you must not do is 'just anything.' Why? Because in a story where anything can happen and anything can be true, nothing matters. You have no reason to care what happens. It's all arbitrary, and arbitrary isn't interesting.

You'll lose your reader if you are vague, not clear, and not present. We love details, personal connections, stories.

I wanted to write a story that was different than what I've done before - so I decided to write dual love stories that will keep the reader wondering how the stories will come together by the end.

Don't mistake a good setup for a satisfying conclusion - many beginning writers end their stories when the real story is just ready to begin.

People at a point of conflict are always the most interesting stories to tell.

If you can take it to the next level and really tell an interesting story in a unique and fresh way, then I feel like that's a great song.

I didn't want to just write stories that were entertaining. Nor did I want to be so scholarly that people couldn't digest it.