John Crowley Quotes

Will the reader turn the page?

I would imagine that anyone picking up a book written by me would expect a fast-paced story that requires minimal effort to turn the pages. The reader would also be looking for some out-of-the-ordinary revelations along the way. At the end of the day, I'm a writer who simply loves revealing stuff that is out-of-the-ordinary.

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.

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

I like the eclipses, the synaptic jumps of short stories. The reader has to participate very actively in the experience.

When the reader and one narrator know something the other narrator does not, the opportunities for suspense and plot development and the shifting of reader sympathies get really interesting.

I want to tell a story that makes the reader always want to see what will happen next.

Conflict and character are the heart of good fiction, and good mystery has both of those in spades.

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.

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

I want the reader to know what's going on. So there's never a mystery in my books.

As a writer, you're making a pact with the reader; you're saying, 'Look, I know and you know that if this book was really a murder investigation, it would be a thousand pages long and would be very dull, and you would be very unhappy with the ending.'

The last paragraph, in which you tell what the story is about, is almost always best left out.

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

That's what a good crime novelist - any good novelist - should do with you: play with your perceptions while showing you everything in plain sight.

The author always knows more than the reader does at the start of a novel, and gradually, they share that knowledge with the reader - that's storytelling.

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.

A lot of the stories I write about have an element of mystery. They're crime stories or conspiracy stories or quests. They do have built into them revelations and twists. But the revelations, to me, come from seeing history as it's unfolding, or life as it's unfolding.

What keeps readers turning pages is suspense, which you can create using a variety of techniques, including tension, pacing and foreshadowing.

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

The novel is a seduction; a reader has to be seduced.

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

Of course, I'm being rude. I'm spoiling the ending, not only of the entire book, but of this particular piece of it. I have given you two events in advance, because I don't have much interest in building mystery. Mystery bores me. It chores me. I know what happens and so do you. It's the machinations that wheel us there that aggravate, perplex, interest, and astound me. There are many things to think of. There is much story.

This element of surprise or mystery the detective element as it is sometimes rather emptily called is of great importance in a plot.

Narrative tension is primarily about withholding information.