Catherine Drinker Bowen Quotes

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 want the reader to turn the page and keep on turning until the end.

As a reader, I happen to like turning pages and wanting to know what happens next.

People want to find out what happens to the characters, and want to keep reading, and turning the pages.

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.

We are all like Scheherazade's husband, in that we want to know what happens next.

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

I try to end every chapter with an air of suspense. I try to leave the reader wanting to turn the page.

I'm writing for my ideal reader, for somebody who's willing to take the time, who's willing to get lost in a new world, who's willing to do their part. But then I have to do my part and give them a sound and a voice that they believe in enough to keep going.

For me, the writing process is the same as the reading process. I want to know what happens next.

People really want to think that these things really happened. I don't know why that important, but I know that when I finish reading a novel or something, I want to know how much of that really happened to this author.

Long intros are cool because there's a little bit of anticipation, you know?

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

Questions that require answers are what keep readers going - and the place to start raising those questions is with your very first sentence.

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.

To me, there's still nothing more thrilling than, every week, people getting to see another chapter in this story that you're telling.

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

If it's commercial fiction that you want to write, it's story, story, story. You've got to get a story where if you tell it to somebody in a paragraph, they'll go, "Tell me more." And then when you start to write it, they continue to want to read more. And if you don't, it won't work.

I think a little menace is fine to have in a story. For one thing, it's good for the circulation.

Storytelling, in print or speech, needs vital energy.

I went back to the notion of story, which is always a good thing to have if you're trying to get people to pay attention to a book and pick up information along the way.

That's the mark of a great storyteller, never to give away secrets in advance.

My job as an author is to tell the story in the best way possible, to make it flow seamlessly and get the reader to keep turning the page.

Hack fiction exploits curiosity without really satisfying it or making connections between it and anything else in the world.

I write for the same reason I read: to find out what's going to happen.