M. John Harrison Quotes

I'm so interested in taking tropes from other movies and putting them on something where it doesn't belong.

Genre mechanics are really tricky because if you pay too much attention to the idea of rules of genre, it becomes pretty stale, pretty fast.

I find most 'rules' about how to write a 'good story' confining, and I enjoy writing stories that don't look like stories at all on the surface.

As far as personal philosophies go, I think you should know your ending. I know that's radically different from a lot of other writers who just organically like to find the story. Other than that, I try different things and mess around. I'm still just playing a good bit.

Let the novelists fret about consistency - story writers should feel free to jam; to get things right in new, surprising ways by allowing themselves, now and then, to get things wrong.

I always try to tell a good story, one with a compelling plot that will keep the pages turning. That is my first and primary goal. Sometimes I can tackle an issue-homelessness, tobacco litigation, insurance fraud, the death penalty-and wrap a good story around it.

The expected vertical line of Ikiru's narrative breaks when Kurosawa does a flash-forward in the middle of the film.

The only interesting answers are those that destroy the questions.

I think it's no coincidence that people who are good at writing far-out fiction are also good at meta-fiction. Think of all the best Phillip K. Dick stories, where you experience a sort of dislocation, and suddenly what you think you've been reading is, in fact, something else entirely.

I want the reader to feel something is astonishing. Not the 'what happens,' but the way everything happens. These long short story fictions do that best, for me.

I know that my tendency is to be linear, and I'm trying to find ways to subvert that. And so in 'Bellocq's Ophelia' my device for subverting it was to tell the story and then to tell it again; it always circles back to this one moment, and it's not linear, but it's round in that way, and much of 'Native Guard' is like that.

My feeling is there's a lot of straight drama on television. My goal in life is to try to create something unexpected, and genre is the tool in doing that.

I think a script is great when it starts with the structure and works with the structure without falling into the typical three-act system in which the audience is ahead of the movie. I hate that, but that is like 99% of what I read.

I'm working with fragments a lot of the time and the connective tissue isn't there yet. I think of it the way comics work. You have a block here and a block here, and there's this white space in between. Somehow your mind makes the leap to connect those two blocks. Finding a way to trick your mind into connecting those blocks is one of the fun things for me about writing. You can have those leaps that will emerge into something, if you're lucky.

I don't really have the gift of the sustained narrative that you need to write a book. I've tried a couple of times, and it just doesn't work. But I get some good passages, so what I'm going to do is just take sections out of them.

Honestly, when you start talking about genres, you're talking as much about the business side of writing as anything else. Certainly there are elements of reader expectation that play into various genres, and those are important, but it also becomes about packaging, placement, audience....In the end, I'm not a fan of labels. I think the best fiction blurs the boundaries between genres, stretches and breaks them.

When you're writing a story, you're creating something of an artificial ending.

I'm one of those writers who started off writing novels and came to writing short stories later, partly because I didn't have the right ideas, partly because I think that short stories are more difficult. I think learning to write short stories also made me attracted toward a paring down of the novel form.

I always was interested in prose. As a teenager, I published short stories. And I always wanted to write the long short story, I wanted to write a novel. Now that I have attained, shall I say, a respectable age, and have had experiences, I feel much more interested in prose, in the novel. I feel that in a novel, for example, you can get in toothbrushes and all the paraphernalia that one finds in dally life, and I find this more difficult in poetry.

The effect produced by a short story depends almost entirely on its form.

I consider a story merely as a frame on which to stretch my materials.

Once you play with these scenes and you're outlining it, again and again, and telling each other the narrative, and telling it to people you know, trying to make sure that the mathematics of the story work, you feel that those are in place, and the actual writing and final draft doesn't take as long.

I am thoroughly tired of the fable style of narrative and shall do my best to get up something entirely different and possibly little more worthy.

Novels are more difficult simply because they are longer and require more juggling, but short stories are closer to perfection, if you can get the language right.

When you tell a story in the kitchen to a friend, it's full of mistakes and repetitions. It's good to avoid that in literature, but still, a story should feel like a conversation. It's not a lecture.