Brian Stelfreeze 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.

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

I love a really good storyline.

To be completely honest, I just like whatever tells a good story. Put me in whatever setting, scenario, genre. If you're telling a good story, it's great and it's fun to get caught up in.

I'm a total slave to a good story.

I loved writing 'Lost.' It was like a never-ending opera, in a way.

I believe that, in any novel of mine, the principal objective is the construction of the whole.

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.

Judgments and secrets are what make a good novel.

I always think plot is what you fall back on if you can't write, to keep things going.

You have an hour and a half or two hours - maybe two and a half hours - in a movie, and it has to be a self-contained three-act structure. It's like a rock and roll song. Certain things have to happen for it to be a toe-tapper and get people excited, leaving the theater.

All fiction relies on the real world in the sense that we all take in the world through our five senses and we accumulate details, consciously or subconsciously. This accumulation of detail can be drawn on when you write fiction.

I think the tricky balance, the most important thing more than the horror is to have a compelling story, compelling drama, a show about great characters that you care about and you want to come back every week to see what they're up to.

Fiction is life with the dull bits left out.

As a writer, I try to appeal to the 'elusive boy audience' the same way I try to appeal to everyone: I do the very best I can to create interesting characters, addictive plots, tons of conflict, believable settings, unexpected plot twists, intriguing beginnings, and satisfying endings.

For success, the author must make the reader care about the destiny of the principals, and sustain this anxiety, or suspense, for about 100,000 words.

In plotting a book, my goal is to raise the stakes for the characters and, in so doing, keep the reader mesmerized.

What I do is put my characters into situations that are so precarious there is no way to get out. And then I figure how to get them out.

If you're not connected emotionally to a story, then you're dead. You're really just opening the door for people to lose interest and their minds to wander, for them to start picking it apart.

Big stories need human stakes.

I'm just an entertainer. In a way crime stories are boring. A crime's been committed and at the end you know it will be solved. So you've got to make the story interesting besides it just being a plot. And that's why character matters, why you've got to make the characters interesting.

I better make the plot good. I wanted to make it grip people on the first page and have a big turning point in the middle, as there is, and construct the whole thing like a roller coaster ride.

Fiction is about intimacy with characters, events, places.

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

The more successful the villain, the more successful the picture.