If you read the first page of one of my novels, I can guarantee that you will read the last one. This isn't just social commentary. This is also about writing good page-turners. I want people to keep reading.
Every morning I'd have coffee with my wife and we would discuss ideas. Sixty percent of what I did for the stores was concepts. The other forty percent was correcting and cleaning up other concepts in house, or doing final art on my concepts. Most of my concepts were so finished they could turn them over to somebody else.
Some formulas are too complex and I don't want anything to do with them.
No one reads to hear someone complain about the weather or how poorly their children are behaving. You have to give the readers a reason to turn the page. As a writer you have to invite someone to turn the page. And that is a skill you have to refine. That is why you have to read. You have to read to learn what it is that makes people turn the page.
An amazing thing, the human brain. Capable of understanding incredibly complex and intricate concepts. Yet at times unable to recognize the obvious and simple.
Wes [Anderson] is brilliant, kind, and just absolutely fantastic. He was really amazing in the way he can just take ideas, turn them into such beautiful stories, and then bring them to life with these amazing films the way he does.
Are you up to the challenge? Are you going to be a reproduction or an original? Will you strive to be innovative or imitative? Are you ready to take your turn on the page, turn up the heat, turn it on?
When you're reading a newspaper and you're seeing ads on the page, it's not kind of invasive. Like, it's on the page next to the article. You can look at it or not. You can turn the page when you're ready. On the internet, the ads - many of the ads - just are so controlling. They insist that you see them.
You need to give the reader a reason to turn the page. In a diary, you are just yourself. You aren't trying to entertain. You aren't trying to get anyone to turn the page. I have over one hundred and fifty six volumes of my diary and I guarantee you that if you read them, you'd stop and never come back.
As winter approaches - bringing cold weather and family drama - we crave page-turners, books made for long nights and tryptophan-induced sloth.
While growing up, I always had to depend on foreign authors for page-turners. I think of myself as a commercial writer, and my job is simple to entertain you.
Page after page of professional economic journals are filled with mathematical formulas leading the reader from sets of more or less plausible but entirely arbitrary assumptions to precisely stated but irrelevant theoretical conclusions.
I'm reading "The Sunset of a Splendid Century" by W.H. Lewis. He was C.S. Lewis's brother. He wrote two books about the French court of Louis XIV that are incredibly detailed. They are books that on every page you say, "Wow, think of that."
No book is a chapter, no chapter tells the whole story, no mistake defines who we are. Hope makes our lives page turners.
Obviously, I like to write stories that are page-turners. But I always try my very, very hardest to be as factually true as possible.
I've been influenced by so many different writers along the way - from Charles Dickens, Roger Zelazny, Michael Moorcock, John D. McDonald, and so many others - that it would take a page or two to list them all.