Thrill Me Quotes

“The best way to mess with the head of your reader is to strategize the delivery of bad news.”
― Benjamin Percy, Thrill Me: Essays on Fiction

“The editor-writer relationship should not be thought of as adversarial.”
― Benjamin Percy, Thrill Me: Essays on Fiction

“Q: What’s the key to suspense? A: I’ll tell you later.”
― Benjamin Percy, Thrill Me: Essays on Fiction

“The more characters you have, the bigger the book, the more flaming chain saws.”
― Benjamin Percy, Thrill Me: Essays on Fiction

“For those who have never visited it, the downtown Powell’s takes up a whole city block. A giant concrete split-level sarcophagus of books. There is a ghost that haunts the water fountain. An urn of cremated remains that moves from room to room. The shelves spill books, used and new, and the aisles buzz with the kind of diversity you’ll only find at the DMV: dudes in suits and dudes in mud-caked cowboy boots, a woman with dreads and a woman with a tiara and a woman with bright blue hair. A carnival of wonders for a kid from the boonies.”
― Benjamin Percy, Thrill Me: Essays on Fiction

“The seagull doesn’t mean anything,” I said. “It’s just a seagull. It’s there for beach ambience.”
― Benjamin Percy, Thrill Me: Essays on Fiction

“Realism is the trend.”
― Benjamin Percy, Thrill Me: Essays on Fiction

“Don’t forget the most basic reason we read: to discover what happens next. Make certain your devotion to pretty sentences and flesh-and-blood characters and cityscapes and exquisitely crafted metaphors works in service of story, contributing to the momentum that will propel your readers forward.”
― Benjamin Percy, Thrill Me: Essays on Fiction

“Matters of the heart make your world worth occupying.”
― Benjamin Percy, Thrill Me: Essays on Fiction

“So you could write what you know. The problem, of course, is that some people don’t know shit.”
― Benjamin Percy, Thrill Me: Essays on Fiction

“Maybe Virginia Woolf thought about going to the lighthouse, but I doubt she ever got there, or the novel might have ended differently.”
― Benjamin Percy, Thrill Me: Essays on Fiction

“I would encourage subtlety. Nabokov’s bubble gum or Munro’s water over Dumbo’s magic feather.”
― Benjamin Percy, Thrill Me: Essays on Fiction

“You’ve got to write every day as if you were clocking in for a job. Or if not every day, then damn near it. If you’re not disciplined in your production—if you’re writing only when the mood strikes or when a deadline looms—then naturally you’ll be more protective of your work, so that when it comes time to cut, your saw will tremble with hesitation. But if you’re producing reams of pages, you’ll be less resistant to revision, because you know it won’t be long before another load of timber comes down the road.”
― Benjamin Percy, Thrill Me: Essays on Fiction

“A-B-D-C-E structure of a story, an acronym for Action-Background-Development-Conflict-Ending.”
― Benjamin Percy, Thrill Me: Essays on Fiction

“When you let the camera linger, when you crowd a scene with details, you are announcing that everything is important, and if you do this constantly, then you are also saying that everything is important, and when everything is important, nothing is important.”
― Benjamin Percy, Thrill Me: Essays on Fiction

“people who read short stories love endings that make them want to gargle with Drano or nosedive off a skyscraper. But”
― Benjamin Percy, Thrill Me: Essays on Fiction

“Or are you exclusively “artful” because it’s easier to excuse your sloppiness as purposeful?”
― Benjamin Percy, Thrill Me: Essays on Fiction