Words matter. These are the best Sarah Pinborough Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
My first six books were horror, I think because when I was young I loved Stephen King. John Wyndham, Daphne Du Maurier, and it’s natural to try and emulate the books you first loved.
I’m a lot less travelled as an adult than I was as a child, but I think living in far flung places gives you a perspective on the world and people that adds flavour to your writing.
I wrote my first five horror novels while I was teaching.
I’ve seen a range of children’s personalities, so it’s easier to write about them without patronising them, I think.
Adults lie to themselves all the time about what is acceptable, but kids know what is right and wrong.
With TV, your first draft just doesn’t matter. It’s a skeleton, and then there’s draft after draft after draft, and so many other factors influence it. It’s just a whole different kind of storytelling.
The unreliable narrator is an odd concept. The way I see it, we’re all unreliable narrators of our lives who usually have absolute trust in our self-told stories. Any truth is, after all, just a matter of perspective.
Monsters don’t scare me at all; I think creepy is scarier than gore. I tend to read more thrillers and mysteries than horror, though. I like a good whodunnit. If I want scary, I tend to reach for a movie. I think it’s a great medium for horror.
Anybody’s life is probably a mess of secrets and lies when you boil it right down.
I just always lived in stories in my head. I believed I was a Martian princess until I was 10. I believed I was never going to die, and I’d been adopted and put on Earth because there was a war… and still sometimes, as I get older, I hope for my immortal life on Mars.
We can never see who someone really is underneath the skin.
The Thames Torso murders almost fell into my lap. After deciding to use a real historical crime as the focus for the book, I went to Google and searched for unsolved murders in Victorian London, and they basically popped out at me about halfway down the first results page.
The strange thing about living somewhere for a couple of years and then moving on and not returning is that those locations become ghosts of themselves in your mind.
I always found the witches and wicked stepmothers far more interesting than the ‘heroines’ – at least they actually did something.
I would quite like to become a mainstream thriller writer, obviously, because I enjoy writing those stories, and it is the best way to secure your career.
We all love a bit of ‘true love conquers all,’ and when I started on ‘Poison,’ ‘Charm’ and ‘Beauty,’ that was one rule of the fairy tale formula that I didn’t want to break.
It would appear that I just love writing many different stories.
I don’t mind a narrator who’s self-deceiving, but the clues for their truth have to be there for the reader to see.
