Sarah Pinborough Quotes

I've always believed that a good twist is one that, when it is presented to the audience, half of them say, 'I saw that coming.' And half of them are completely and totally shocked. Because if you don't have the half that saw it coming, then it wasn't fair: You never gave the audience a chance to guess it.

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.

I think predictability is built into any good novel in some way - you begin reading Anna Karenina and you know pretty much what's going to happen at the end. But that doesn't mean you know what's going to happen in the middle. For me, it's that sense of what happens in the middle that's important.

My crime novels are highly structured. I never start out with a dead body. I start with an impossible scenario. Opening questions should be mysterious, weird, intriguing, and contain the seeds of the solution. The structure has to be meticulous - I'm a structure freak.

I hate to go to movies or watch a TV show and know the ending within 15 minutes.

I don't like twists. I don't get much out of them. If you know two cars are about to run into each other, you don't walk away and say, 'Oh, I know what's going to happen.' You watch.

It's amazing how far you can get into a plot before you figure out what you're doing.

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

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.

In episodic TV you have to keep things secret to keep the viewer in suspense.

I have an idea, and I have a perpetrator, and I write the book along those lines, and when I get to the last chapter, I change the perpetrator so that if I can deceive myself, I can deceive the reader.

If I watch something, I want to be wondering what is going to happen next; I want to be engaged in a way that makes me ask questions and think about how I can relate myself to the characters and the issues that are there. But if it's just fluff, and everything is spelt out, I find it difficult to concentrate.

In particular, I'm drawn to the stories that have big, high concepts and real characters at their heart. And I love where those two worlds meet, and 'Edge of Tomorrow' is the perfect canvas to explore that.

I did know that the book would end with a mind-boggling trial, but I didn't know exactly how it would turn out. I like a little suspense when I am writing, too.

You just never know what the grand plan is on 'Dexter,' so I didn't know if I was going to make it to the next episode, let alone the next season!

I like the idea of shows where I don't know where I'll be at the end of the season.

Jeff Eastin is good in that he'll tell me a plot twist that's coming up if he thinks it would be something Peter would know ahead of time, and if it's something that would be a surprise to Peter, I'll tell Jeff, 'Oh, don't tell me. I don't want to know.' And then it's exciting to read it and exciting to play it.

We give you characters we'd feel very comfortable judging, and then go: 'Oh yeah? Watch this'.

I don't like spoilers. I don't like things being spoiled.

On TV, you never know where it's going. They may even lie to you about where it's going. You never really know because the scripts come in every couple of weeks or so.

It's funny: I like being surprised as a reader, so it's difficult for me to spoil my own stuff.

One of the things I admire about longer stories is the way writers can work with dead time and slower, more idle moments - not only can they feel expansive, they feel lived-in; the unhurried pacing often makes the endings even more resonant and surprising for me.

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.

We always talk about how the first several seasons were faithful to the books, and anybody who wanted to could go onto Wikipedia and learn Ned Stark gets beheaded or about The Red Wedding, and most people don't want to know - because why ruin a story?

The challenge in any kind of storytelling, as far as I know, it is, you're looking for the moment that is completely unexpected, but at the same time, you think to yourself, 'Of course, that's the only way it could have gone.' It has to feel like it's the truth of it.