Ken Liu Quotes

I don't write genre stuff in any form. I'm not interested in it. I always try to do the opposite of that.

A good ground rule for writing in any genre is, start with a form, then undermine its confidence in itself. Ask what it's afraid of, what it's trying to hide - then write that.

If you want to write serious books, you must be ready to break the forms.

I like the way Wiseman builds a story in an unconventional way.

If you have a good story idea, don't assume it must form a prose narrative. It may work better as a play, a screenplay or a poem. Be flexible.

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 like the idea of building this wandering, epic narrative in a form that people don't expect epic narratives to appear.

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

A novel, at least for me, cannot be visualized at one time.

Every story is organic, and every story finds its own ending.

I love television, and my love for it has made me curious about writing it. It feels like television's moving toward something more novelistic, and that's what I started wanting to do. But I can't say that I'm dying to get notes from a studio. The artistic control that you get as a playwright is worth its weight in gold.

If you're going to clutter up the world with more novels, you should do a little more than entertain people.

I discovered ... that a novel has nothing to do with words in the first instance. Writing a novel is a cosmological matter, like the story told by Genesis (we all have to choose our role models, as Woody Allen puts it).

The difference between writing a story and simply relating past events is that a story, in order to be acceptable, must have shape and meaning. It is the old idea that art is the bringing of order out of chaos.

The form is always integral to the expression of the theme or to the sheer telling of the story, and sometimes the right form is apparent to me from the outset and sometimes it isn't.

Then what shall I write? I can't just write that this happened then this happened then this happened to boring infinitum. I'll let my journal grow just like the mind does, just like a tree or beast does, just like life does. Why should a book tell a tale in a dull straight line? Words should wander and meander. They should fly like owls and flicker like bats and slip like cats. They should murmur and scream and dance and sing.

Personally, one of the most helpful things I learned was three-act structure. For my first four or so novels, I built the structure intuitively.

I let myself go at the beginning and write with an easy mind, but by the time I get to the middle I begin to grow timid and to fear my story will be too long. . .That is why the beginning of my stories is always very promising and looks as though I were starting on a novel, and the middle is huddled and timid, and the end is...like fireworks.

Songwriters are expanding time rather than compressing time. My short stories tend to be old fashioned, with a beginning, middle and end.

In order to be a living, breathing thing, a novel has to be failed in some kind of way. Or at least that's how I keep writing them.

Stories have tangents; they open up and become different things. You can still have a structure, but you should leave room to dream. If you stay true to your ideas, filmmaking becomes an inside-out, honest kind of process. And if it's an honest thing for you, there's a chance that people will feel that, even if it's abstract.

The older I get and the more fiction I write, the more I outline, the more I think about plot before I dive in and plunge too far.

I don't start a story until I know where it's going to end.

When asked for advice by beginners. Know your ending, I say, or the river of your story may finally sink into the desert sands and never reach the sea.

A short story is a love affair, a novel is a marriage. A short story is a photograph; a novel is a film.