William Golding Quotes

A novel requires a certain kind of world-building and also a certain kind of closure, ultimately. Whereas with a short story you have this sense that there are hinges that the reader doesn't see.

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.

The unfolding of a story is both as exciting and as difficult for each and every novel I've written, regardless of time and place.

With a novel, you have to have a story. It's much more important to have it matter to the reader what happens to people, and it has to make sense and end in a way that is satisfying. So I spend a lot more time thinking about that. Then the writing itself usually is easier for me, because I know where it's going.

Everything's always about page-turning, right? What's next? So, if you create questions for audiences, then they'll want to know the answer. Or they begin to formulate possible outcomes. That's the game we play when we're hearing a story unfold. That's part of what sucks us into a movie.

I'm not working on the Great American Novel. All I am doing, I hope, is entertaining readers.

I'm a big believer that the structure of stories should reflect the content of the story.

I try to write short novels and leave details out not because I want to be minimalist, but because I think that it enables the readers' creativity and interaction with the book.

I care about narrative structure; I care about how stories unfold.

I think audiences can feel when they're being served a filler episode.

There comes a time in every writer's life when it becomes necessary to recognize what people really care about.

Even in something surreal like 'Father Ted,' everything has to logically follow, everything has to lead one to another. The moment the logic of a situation doesn't work then you might as well not bother because people have signed out.

With both novels and short stories, I think a lot in terms of character arcs, when it comes to endings.

For me, 'The Hobbit' is an object lesson in storytelling, both in terms of characterization and story structure. It is an exemplar of storytelling in that regard.

There's a real art to telling a story in two hours, and that will always be something that people are very, very interested in.

As an author, you think you know where the good parts and the bad parts are. And then you read to a group of children, and you learn when you're boring them, and you hurry through those sections to get to the parts where they're interested again. You start to get a sense of your story's rhythm and flow.

There are many oral historians in America, but my books are made using the rules of novel writing. I have a beginning, a plot, characters.

If significant amounts of time go by without suspenseful action - which is often most powerfully motivated by backstory - the story loses momentum, and readers lose interest.

You spend so much time as a writer telling straight and linear stories.

I think all good short stories are about what it means to tell a good story.

I'm a huge believer in story being this invisible scaffolding that no one ever recognizes or realizes is actually making the audience engaged in what's going on. There is no formula for it.

No reader wants to sit through the same scene four times in a row, unless they're radically different.

If you say in the first chapter that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the second or third chapter it absolutely must go off. If it's not going to be fired, it shouldn't be hanging there.

The nature of a movie story is you have to keep charging forward and keep the audience with the story.

If you have a problem with the third act, the real problem is in the first act.