James McBride Quotes

My preferred style is to write in first person, so I always have to play around with possible narrator voices until I find something that works.

When one is writing a novel in the first person, one must be that person.

I spent ages figuring out things like viewpoint, how you tell the story, and so on.

I have an idea for a story, and if the idea is going to work, then one of the characters steps forward, and I hear her voice telling the story. This is what has happened with all the books I've written in the first person.

Because I write fiction, I don't write autobiography, and to me they are very different things. The first-person narrative is a very intimate thing, but you are not addressing other people as 'I' - you are inhabiting that 'I.'

Point-of-view is a matter that readers rarely pay attention to, yet it's one of the most important story decisions an author makes.

I'm here to get the story on to the page. It would be good to catch your attention, and I have to make you want to read on, and I suppose I prefer you don't actually think about the 'how' at all - the writing technique, the 'style', or even who it is that's putting this together.

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

It's a dead give away of an inexperienced writer if every character speaks with the same voice.

I normally write in the first person, and my narrators are as real to me as any of the people I have worked with. They live and breathe in my imagination.

In prose, leaps of logic can be made while the protagonist thinks about things and arrives at conclusions. Even with voiceover, there's no real way of having an inner voice without it taking over the entire story.

I have an affinity for writing in the first person. I love the intimacy of being dropped inside the character.

'The Last Of Us,' to me, is just amazing storytelling, because everything's from the character point of view, which even movies don't really do successfully a lot of the time.

I write from this tight third-person viewpoint, where each chapter is seen through the eyes of one individual character. When I'm writing that character, I become that character and identify with that character.

First-person narrators is the way I know how to write a book with the greatest power and chance of artistic success.

Like 'Metro' and 'Motor,' 'Troublemaker' is written in first person. The only narration that happens is Barney speaking to the reader/thinking in her head. First person was a big challenge in the graphic novel because we want both men and women of all ages to enjoy 'Troublemaker.'

With novels, you're representing things. You're not explaining.

I like to describe my characters as though they were all trapped in a glass box.

If you have a single narrator, a person like an "I" - "'I' did this" and "'I' did that" - it automatically solves the most difficult problem in writing.

It's also possible to have two third person singular points of view, as represented by two characters through whose eyes the story is told in alternating chapters, say.

You never want to be in a position where your reader feels like you're passing judgment on your own characters. Any novel where you feel like the author is talking to the reader over the characters' heads is in a bad place.

I'm a novelist, so I can't write about ideas unless they're attached to people.

An attempt to write nothing but characterization will soon bog down; I for one don't want to have somebody tell me about someone else.

The decision for me was whether to have 'The Father' be a book that told a story - from the point of view of this speaker, the daughter - without, as in the earlier books, then having a section on something else and a section on something else.

I find it an easy way into writing pieces is to think what the character's voice is like, and start from there.