Top 100 Quotes About Mystery Writing
#1. Mystery writing involves solving a puzzle, but 'high suspense' writing is a situation whereby the writer thrusts the hero/heroine into high drama.
Iris Johansen
#2. Homosexuality just wasn't what it used to be in the Golden Age of mystery writing.
Josh Lanyon
#3. I like to believe my suspense novels marry the strong characters from my romance writing past, with the twisty, clever plots of my mystery writing present.
Lisa Gardner
#5. What would life be like without her writing? Writing filled her life with beauty and mystery, gave it life ... and promise.
Maud Hart Lovelace
#6. In the early Seventies, I started writing a little autobiographical novel about my childhood - I made it into a mystery story.
Bobbie Ann Mason
#7. I grew up reading comic books, pulp books, mystery and science fiction and fantasy. I'm a geek; I make no pretensions otherwise. It's the stuff that I love writing about. I like creating worlds.
David S.Goyer
#8. The writer is often faced with two choices
turn away from the reality of life's intimidating complexity or conquer its mystery by battling with it. The writer who chooses the former soon runs out of energy and produces elegantly tired fiction.
Chinua Achebe
#9. He challenged the world with his genius, and the world defeated him by ignoring the challenge and starving him. He stopped writing because he had failed and because he had no choice but to accept the world's terms: there is no mystery here. This was not insanity, but common sense.
Raymond Weaver
#10. The mystery of writing advertisements consists mainly in saying in a few plain words exactly what it is desired to say, precisely as it would be written in a letter or told to an acquaintance.
George P. Rowell
#11. Writing a mystery is more difficult than other kinds of books because a mystery has a certain framework that must be superimposed over the story.
Martha Grimes
#12. The writer has to take risks and go somewhere full of mystery and possibility for the novel to deepen over the years it takes to write it.
Dana Spiotta
#13. Knowing that Gene and Morgan were playing those roles made it much easier to put the script together-we knew who we were writing it for. It took some mystery away.
Stephen Hopkins
#15. All the details of the life and the quirks and the friendships can be laid out for us, but the mystery of the writing will remain. No amount of documentation, however fascinating, can take us there.
V.S. Naipaul
#16. I couldn't very well make a special delivery to the door of the constabulary now could I? And he'd have made the perfect scapegoat. That aura of misery he wraps himself in. So Byronesque. He's too immersed in his own guilt to ever suspect it in another.
Ella J. Fraser
#17. If the stories come, you get them written, you're on the right track. Eventually everyone learns his or her own best way. The real mystery to crack is you.
Bernard Malamud
#18. I started writing short stories. I tried writing horror, mystery, science fiction. I joined a little critique group here in town and ran my stories past them. After about three years, I tackled my first novel, Subterranean. It took me 11 months to write.
James Rollins
#19. The mysterious does not spell itself out in capital letters, as many writers believe, but is always between, an interstice.
Julio Cortazar
#20. In truly good writing no matter how many times you read it you do not know how it is done. That is beacause there is a mystery in all great writing and that mystery does not dis-sect out. It continues and it is always valid. Each time you re-read you see or learn something new.
Ernest Hemingway,
#21. There is nothing I can't do writing in Fantasy. I can have romance, I can have mystery, I can have drama, I can have good characters - I can have everything you can do in any other genre ... plus a dragon.
Patrick Rothfuss
#22. Irene Bennett Brown keeps the promise of her gifted writing and love for history inside this fine contemporary mystery. I loved it.
Jane Kirkpatrick
#23. At the heart of the impulse to tell stories is a mystery so profound.
Dennis Covington
#24. I started doing '30 Rock' and started writing 'Mystery Team' at the beginning of that. While I was doing 'Mystery Team,' I started practicing stand-up. While I was doing stand up, I got 'Community.' It's like I planted trees six years ago, and now they have fruit.
Donald Glover
#25. Not writing is never an option. This is not words of advice. It's just literally never an option!
Lillian R. Melendez
#26. The characters are always the focal point of a book for me, whether I'm writing or reading. I may enjoy a book that has an intriguing mystery or a good plot, but to become one of my real favorites, it has to have great characters.
Candace Camp
#27. Writing a new play shouldn't be seen as a mystery belonging to a priesthood, but as a challenge, a technical challenge, just to get into it.
Tom Stoppard
#28. If you're writing a thriller, mystery, Western or adventure-driven book, you'd better keep things moving rapidly for the reader. Quick pacing is vital in certain genres. It hooks readers, creates tension, deepens the drama, and speeds things along.
Nancy Kress
#29. In writing, I apply my feminine side and respect the mystery involved in creation.
Paulo Coelho
#31. That is the mystery about writing: it comes out of afflictions, out of the gouged times, when the heart is cut open.
Edna O'Brien
#32. When you're writing a whodunit, the dead body is the most important character. It's the pivot point around which the plot spins.
Adrianne Lee
#33. The big trinity of publishing: mystery, thrillers and romance. If you can combine all three, then it's a winner's trifecta and you'll be rich beyond your dreams.
Dermot Davis
#34. I always tell my writing students that every good piece of writing begins with both a mystery and a love story. And that every single sentence must be a poem. And that economy is the key to all good writing. And that every character has to have a secret.
Silas House
#35. The appeal of writing is primarily the investigation of mystery.
Joyce Carol Oates
#36. Fiction is lies; we're writing about people who never existed and events that never happened when we write fiction, whether its science fiction or fantasy or western mystery stories or so-called literary stories. All those things are essentially untrue. But it has to have a truth at the core of it.
George R R Martin
#37. That's how it is for us servants. No one pays you much heed; mostly you're invisible as furniture. Yet you overhear a conversation here, and add a little gossip there. A writing desk lies open and you cannot help but read a paper. Then you find something, something you should not have found ...
Martine Bailey
#38. I never thought I was capable of writing a whole book until Ursula K. Le Guin, with whom I worked briefly in publishing, said, 'you already wrote one (referencing a screenplay), you just need to add the details.
E.L. Sayers
#39. I don't think there's any great mystery to writing female characters, so long as you talk to them. If you lived in a monastery and never met any women, maybe it would be difficult.
Ken Follett
#40. I started writing half a paragraph of a mystery novel, half a paragraph there, and they were terrible.
Rabih Alameddine
#41. Writing is not a mystery. It is a craft like any other, and it can be learned.
Robert Scholes
#42. There's a mystery to writing, and you don't really know where most of it comes from.
Neil Diamond
#43. I don't believe in writer's block. Who can function working seven days a week at at job. It's the same with writing. Take a break and let the words come to you. It rarely comes if you force it and if it does, you'll probably regret what you wrote down on paper.
Lillian R. Melendez
#44. I'm not a fan of mysteries, so to prepare for this experience of writing a mystery I started reading the most successful ones in the market in 2012 ... And I realized I cannot write that kind of book. It's too gruesome, too violent, too dark; there's no redemption there.
Isabel Allende
#45. The first song that I remember writing in its entirety was when I was 9 years old. I wrote it on a bus, on a field trip. It was called 'Mystery Man,' and in retrospect, it was the beginning of my exploration of what it was like to have a man in your life, because I didn't.
Kat Edmonson
#46. I think the mystery of art lies in this, that artists' relationship is essentially with their work - not with power, not with profit, not with themselves, not even with their audience.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#47. Actors are all about entrances, but writers are all about exits.
Vincent H. O'Neil
#48. What I like about teaching is the discipline of finding words to unpack the artistic process. And I admire the drive in students who want to write, the mystery of how artistic talent unfolds.
Alison Hawthorne Deming
#49. That's what I love most about writers
they're such lousy actors.
Vincent H. O'Neil
#50. Historical novels are about costumery. I think that's the magic and mystery of fiction. I don't want to write historical fiction but I do want the story to have the feel of history. There's a difference.
Chang-rae Lee
#51. Simone Weil is a mystery that should keep us all humble, and I need it more than most. Also she's the example of the religious consciousness without a religion which maybe sooner or later I will be able to write about.
Flannery O'Connor
#52. When all the details fit in perfectly, something is probably wrong with the story.
Charles Baxter
#53. I could displace the mystery of my speech onto writing, the latter perhaps recharging the former
Ben Lerner
#54. It's so damn hard to write a great historical mystery based on fact. It's not for lack of trying.
Jon Turteltaub
#55. A great book is a thing of mystery and beauty; it has the power to move you.
Neil Leckman
#56. The kind of poetry I write, lyric poetry, I think is really concerned with intimacy, with mystery. That needn't be religious mystery, there are mysteries to do with everyday life.
Kevin Hart
#57. There is a mystery in all great writing and that mystery does not dissect out. It continues and is always valid.
Ernest Hemingway,
#58. I don't know - it's a bit of a mystery of how things come about when they do. I don't have a scientific explanation for it. Sometimes when you're writing a song, you don't know where you're going.
Robbie Robertson
#59. You know you're writing a good thriller when you make yourself paranoid.
Shirley B. Garrett
#60. What people dont know about you people create. Imagination is a part of being human. They fill in the unknowns with assumptions and not facts. Every man and woman is a mystery unrevealed.
R.M. Engelhardt
#61. The sign of the amateur is overglorification of and preoccupation with the mystery. The professional shuts up. She doesn't talk about it. She does her work.
Steven Pressfield
#62. I write fiction. It may have mystery, it may have horror, it may have fantasy, it may have love, but like life, it's all the same genre.
Don Roff
#63. I think authors are just realizing there's no real reason to feel limited to a narrow set of genre rules in their writing. There's no reason a mystery novel can't have fantastic elements in it. Similarly, there's no reason why your epic fantasy series can't have elements of a mystery.
Patrick Rothfuss
#64. People need to write articles and they need to have angles in them and I'm grateful when people are doing articles, but I always say there's not a great mystery to stand-up comedy.
Jim Gaffigan
#66. The solution, once revealed, must seem to have been inevitable. At least half of all the mystery novels published violate this law.
(Casual Notes on the Mystery Novel, 1949)
Raymond Chandler
#67. The pen, a double-edged mystery: cuts the writer, heals the reader.
Jenim Dibie
#68. Writing mysteries lets me get away with murder. I think 'the mystery' may be the greatest form for social criticism, simply because it is pedestrian.
Gregory McDonald
#69. Writing the middle of a novel is a lot like driving through Texas. You think it's never going to end, and the scenery looks the same.
Carolyn Wheat
#70. Writing a mystery is like drawing a picture and then cutting it into little pieces that you offer to your readers one piece at a time, thus allowing them the chance to put the jigsaw puzzle together by the end of the book.
Ashwin Sanghi
#72. I am a storyteller, spiraling fantasy and reality into mystical tales. That eerie space between fact and fiction, where only the brightest light can scare the shadows - you will find me there.
Sara Frost
#73. Much of songwriting is simply a mystery.
Paul Simon
#74. The things that converge in the writing of a play come from a complex of motives, a genesis shrouded in a certain kind of mystery.
Athol Fugard
#75. Writing for the love of writing. My muse makes no apologies under this pen name. ;)
Amanda Wylde
#76. I devote most of my day to writing, and try to turn out at least four pages a day. As for what triggers the creative process, it's a mystery to me! Characters often just walk on the page, and I wait to see what they do and say while I'm writing them.
Tess Gerritsen
#77. Love interest nearly always weakens a mystery because it introduces a type of suspense that is antagonistic to the detective's struggle to solve a problem.
Raymond Chandler
#78. Improvisation, it is a mystery. You can write a book about it, but by the end no one still knows what it is. When I improvise and I'm in good form, I'm like somebody half sleeping. I even forget there are people in front of me. Great improvisers are like priests; they are thinking only of their god.
Stephane Grappelli
#79. One key to the distinction between mystery and suspense writing involves the relative positions of hero and reader. In the ideal mystery novel, the readers is two steps behind the detective ... The ideal suspense reader, on the other hand, is two steps ahead of the hero.
Carolyn Wheat
#80. I have always loved horror very much. I used to write stories for DC's House of Mystery. It was one of my first jobs writing for comics, and I loved it.
Sergio Aragones
#81. Fiction that adds up, that suggests a "logical consistency," or an explanation of some kind, is surely second-rate fiction; for the truth of life is its mystery.
Joyce Carol Oates
#82. The trick in writing children's books is to set up danger, mystery and excitement on page one. Force the kid to turn the page ... Then in the middle of each chapter there's a dramatic point of excitement, and at chapter's end, a cliffhanger.
Jerry West
#83. When I write, I don't know what is going to emerge. I begin in a condition of complete unknowing, an utter nakedness of concept or goal. A word appears, another word appears, an image. It is a moving into mystery.
Jane Hirshfield
#84. Writing should be an adventure, shrouded in mystery and uncertainty, blessed with amazing grace. In theory, of course
Syd Field
#85. Question marks are shaped like hooks for a reason: they will hook the reader and drag them deeper into the story
Chuck Wendig
#86. It'll be a change," says Marcus. "Something different."
"Not a mystery."
Marcus laughs. "No. Not a mystery. Just a nice safe history."
Ah, my darling. But there is no such thing.
Kate Morton
#87. I was extraordinarily lucky. I wrote a book because I wanted to see if I could write a mystery. Someone nagged me into sending it to a contest, which it won, after which I was offered a two-book contract, thus requiring the writing of a second book.
Donna Leon
#88. I do think that the abiding mystery of my origins has definitely had a profound effect upon my writing. There is that thing in the back of my mind where I think I don't really know who I am. And it may make it a little easier to shift around in my narrative voice.
Gillian Welch
#89. The shriek cut thinly though the drizzling dimness, holding for a long moment. At last it broadened and dropped to the old.
Natalie Babbitt
#90. If there is no mystery, for the artist, to solve inside of his art, then there's no point in it ... for me, every act of art is the act of solving a mystery.
Truman Capote
#91. I thought why not write a kind of mystery, murder, thriller book, but use romance language where the language plays completely against the very dark subject matter, that very strange murderous plot, but use that Harlequin Romance language.
Chuck Palahniuk
#92. Trying to solve the mystery is what I enjoy most about writing.
Jon Ronson
#93. Writing reflects life and life is a mystery. All any of us can do is press the fleet footed beauty of life close to our flesh and use whatever instruments are within our grasp to express the evanescent spark of mysticism that resides within us.
Kilroy J. Oldster
#94. What is the purpose of writing? For me personally, it is really to explain the mystery of life, and the mystery of life includes, of course, the personal, the political, the forces that make us what we are while there's another force from inside battling to make us something else.
Nadine Gordimer
#95. Understanding is not a piercing of the mystery, but an acceptance of it, a living blissfully with it, in it, through and by it.
Henry Miller
#96. Ms. Taylor's writing style is clear, without frills, and so streamlined that her story flows and flows and flows, without taking a break, to its satisfying conclusion.
Maeve of Tara
Vicki M. Taylor
#97. I feel that my life and therefore my writing accept the possibility of all the mystery. Everything we don't know; everything that can possibly happen.
Isabel Allende
#98. The nature of immortality is a mystery,' he says, speaking so softly that we have to lean closer to hear.' But everything I know of writing and reading tells me that this is true. I have felt it in these shelves and in others.
Robin Sloan
#99. A fully-realized and known world is also a boring world. Mystery, alongside conflict, is another of those vital vittles that feeds the reader and keeps them hooked. Question marks are shaped like hooks for a reason, I say
so leave lots of questions.
Chuck Wendig
#100. I found out after reading quite a lot of it that it is not rated very high. He has a very descriptive way of writing but also lengthy. May not want to finish!!!!! This was his 1sr and only try ast Historical Fiction!
Wilkie Collins
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