A Quote by Sydney Pollack

Every story needs an element of suspense - or it's lousy.

Sydney Pollack

Quote Topics

Element Every Lousy Needs Story Suspense

Quote Author

Sydney Pollack
American - Director
July 1, 1934 - May 26, 2008

Plot is what happens in your story. Every story needs structure, just as every body needs a skeleton. It is how you 'flesh out and clothe' your structure that makes each story unique.

Caroline Lawrence

Leadership requires the ability to engage and to create empathy for communities with disparate needs and ideas. Telling an effective story - especially in romantic suspense - demands a similar skill set.

Stacey Abrams

In every story I've written with Batman, there's an element of justice - you never want to have the story end on a defeatist or a cynical note.

Paul Dini

I try to weave a secret into each plot. It's the thread that holds the rest of the story fabric together. In fact, it's the reason for the story. I hint at the secret early on. Immediately I want the reader to get the feeling that something here isn't quite right. It helps maintain the suspense if a puzzling element is introduced in the first few pages of the book, but the answer isn't revealed until the final ones. Hopefully, readers want to know what the heck is really going on, and it's the desire to find out that keeps them turning pages.

Sandra Brown

One of the greatest sins in any story is false suspense. The kind of 'suspense' that disintegrates the moment you give your reader one second to think about it. And it's an easy trap to fall into, so watch carefully for it. If your story hinges on the question, 'Will Superman be pushed so far in his battle against Lex Luthor that he'll have to kill him?', or if your big cliffhanger moment is, 'Wow, is Spider-Man really dead this time?', then I understand Food Lion is hiring.

Mark Waid

When you read a supernatural suspense story or a ghost story, or a horror story, the evil at play is something that you can dismiss. And I wonder if, in this time, if people really want to be sitting on the subway reading a book about someone releasing a dirty bomb on the subway.

Michael Koryta

I think all good narration contains an element of mystery and suspense. If it didn't, if the storyline were predictable, we would have no interest in reading it.

James Lee Burke

You have to tell a super story that has some fantastical element, but the human element is what's going to keep people watching.

Cheo Hodari Coker

I know only two words of American slang, 'swell' and 'lousy'. I think 'swell' is lousy, but 'lousy' is swell.

J. B. Priestley

Every good story needs a complication. We learn this fiction-writing fundamental in courses and workshops, by reading a lot or, most painfully, through our own abandoned story drafts. After writing twenty pages about a harmonious family picnic, say, or a well-received rock concert, we discover that a story without a complication flounders, no matter how lovely the prose. A story needs a point of departure, a place from which the character can discover something, transform himself, realize a truth, reject a truth, right a wrong, make a mistake, come to terms.

Monica Wood

When I'm considering an idea, and there is an element of hubris involved, I generally feel comfortable that it's going to be a good story. Pride goeth before a fall. It's an element of a lot of big stories.

Erik Larson

Every mountain needs someone to climb it, Every ocean needs someone to dive in, Every dream needs someone to wish it, Every adventure needs someone to live it