Amitava Kumar Quotes

When you write fiction, you have an ideal reader in your mind who's sort of you but smarter.

What interests me in writing a novel is taking really remote voices, characters, and stories and beginning to create some kind of web.

I just want to tell a good story, so I always ask myself, 'Are these people real to me?'

You start as an audience member and create a world you're interested in, and then you move into the telling of those stories, bringing what has interested you as an audience member.

I might not write fiction in the literary sense. But I write very well. My characters are good. My dialogue is good. And my stories are really involving.

Fiction novels, that's my game.

I love working fictional characters into a piece of history. It plays to my strengths, which are characterization and dialogue, and assists me in my admitted weakness, plot.

We are writing fiction, but we are trying to create a world that's believable.

As a writer, I have to show complexities. Through my writings, I hope to bring out people in different situations and not just one-dimensional beings.

I often attribute my screenwriting to journalism because they drill in the who, what, when, where and why - but we really need to land on that why. That's what I've been exploring in my writing for many years and trying to get better at.

A great danger, or at least a great temptation, for many writers is to become too autobiographical in their approach to their fiction. A little autobiography and a lot of imagination are best.

Being a novelist is the adult version of a kid creating a make-believe world. But unlike a child, a writer of fiction has to come up with a structured story, one that has as much meaning for others as it has for her.

As a writer, you must know what promise your story or novel makes. Your reader will know.

Basically, fiction is people. You can't write fiction about ideas.

I love writing letters. In order to write a novel in first person, I think I needed an addressee.

When writing fiction, you only have to know enough to be convincing on the page. I mean really convincing, of course - but you don't need academic depth.

I can't write a novel without first really doing reporting. I don't even call it research; it's reporting. That process is very important to the granularity of my writing. I have to know what the reality is so I can be more convincing in the writing.

I read all the time. I was reading a book I admire very much by Alice McDermot called Charming Billy.

As a writer, I try to appeal to the 'elusive boy audience' the same way I try to appeal to everyone: I do the very best I can to create interesting characters, addictive plots, tons of conflict, believable settings, unexpected plot twists, intriguing beginnings, and satisfying endings.

Each of my books is different. Deliberately... I wanted to create my society, my people, in their fullness.

Probably every book I read influenced me in some small way. Authors like Jan Westcott, Kathleen Winsor, Catherine Cookson, Georgette Heyer, and even Barbara Cartland taught me to write character-driven stories.

As fiction writers, we are entertainers.

We start with strong characters and build the movie from there. That not to say we don't struggle with story - that's the most challenging part.

In workshopping short stories I learned how to get character down, and how to work with ratios of literal to fantastic to make a world that people can believe in even if it's a little wild or out there.

Settings are obviously important - and as a writer, you have to respect what was real at the time of the story you're writing. But the real key to success lies in finding the right characters to carry that story.