Reader Interest Quotes

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.

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

There seems to be a peculiar kind of clamor for comics. And I'm not sure how much a part of reality that is. I think partly it's based on some idea that comics are what everybody wants to read - and I don't think that's the case.

I gotta say - if I clicked on a movie interview, and the first part was all about Walt Whitman, I'd love that article.

If you aren't talking to readers and letting them know you're just like them, they can lose interest.

The job of the first eight pages is not to have the reader want to throw the book at the wall, during the first eight pages.

You need that pride in yourself, as well as a sense, when you are sitting on Page 297 of a book, that the book is going to be read, that somebody is going to care. You can't ever be sure about that, but you need the sense that it's important, that it's not typing; it's writing.

There are people out there who will not read books, but somehow they'll read my books.

A trouble with poetry is the presence of presumptuousness in poetry, the sense you get in a poem that the poet takes for granted an interest on the reader's part in the poet's autobiographical life, in the poet's memories, problems, difficulties and even minor perceptions. I try to presume that no one is interested in me. And I think experience bears that out. No one's interested in the experiences of a stranger - let's put it that way. And then you have difficulty combined with presumptuousness, which is the most dire trouble with poetry.

The trick to writing for people is, you have to be able to turn them on in your head. And know how they'd word something or how they'd inflect it.

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

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.

...book-buyers aren't attracted, by and large, by the literary merits of a novel: book-buyers want a good story...something that will first fascinate them, then pull them in and keep them turning the pages.

I am thrilled when I read about fans using my stories as springboards to read about either the historical characters or the myths and legends in the books.

Asymmetric balance creates greater reader interest. Pleasure derived from observing asymmetrical arrangements lies partly in overcoming resistances, which, consciously or not, the spectator adjusts in his own mind.

If you care about who I want to write about, I'll write about the people you want to read about.

Fiction is about human beings, first and foremost. (It's not impossible to write fiction with no human protagonists, but it's very hard to keep the reader interested ...)

I see my responsibility as to give people something they want to keep turning the pages of and giving people something to chew on, looking at some aspect of human nature that hadn't occurred to them recently.

You can tell if you're going to be into a script within the first five or ten pages - if I'm not completely engaged by page 20, I just have to give up on it.

That's why I think the 'Scarpetta' series has worked so well because people like spending time with this character.

I'm here to get the story on to the page. It would be good to catch your attention, and I have to make you want to read on, and I suppose I prefer you don't actually think about the 'how' at all - the writing technique, the 'style', or even who it is that's putting this together.

And I've always worked on the principle that if it interests me enough to write about it, then it must interest a lot of other people.

I don't want my readers slowed down by long passages of narrative.

My most important piece of advice to all you would-be writers: when you write, try to leave out all the parts readers skip.

If we as writers could predict what readers grab on to, we would write it.