Kazuo Ishiguro Quotes

Plot is what happens in your story. Every story needs structure, just as every body needs a skeleton. It is how you 'flesh out and clothe' your structure that makes each story unique.

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.

All the writing elements are the same. You need to tell a good story... You've got good characters... People think there's some dramatic difference between writing 'Little Bear' and the 'Hunger Games,' and as a writer, for me, there isn't.

I'm not very good at story. In fact, compared to character and language, I barely care about story at all.

A novel, in the end, is a container, a shape which you are trying to pour your story into.

You can't write just anything. Your story needs structure.

The only thing I knew about novels from a technical point of view was that they should have conflict.

A short story is something that you can hold in your mind. You can really analyze how the entire thing works, like a machine.

It took me years to learn that sentences in fiction must do much more than stand around and look pretty.

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

I write both fiction and nonfiction. I begin my fiction with the main character. The story comes later.

When it comes to the form the narrative will take, whether first person, third person, or Aunt Grace's cat, I usually find that the story tells me which voice it prefers, and that often changes as I go along. And in the end it really doesn't matter as long as the author can rig those voices all in harness to pull the same load.

In the writing of novels, there is the problem of how to shape a narrative.

As I work, I see my writing - each scene, each chapter, each section, each book - in three-act structures and classic myths, and I analyze them through the handy filter of the detective story.

I think the plasticity of the novel is its greatest challenge. There are no rules; there is no necessary form. You can know what you want it to be, or do, and still not know how to write it. There are endless possibilities, infinite choices. What voice should it be in? What events to start with? What characters will be part of it?

I never believed I could write anything. No way - write a whole story? Figuring out all that plotting and symbolism? How do you foreshadow things?

And before I'd got to the end of the first paragraph, I'd come up slap bang against a fundamental problem that still troubles me today whenever I begin a story, and it's this: where am I telling it from?

I can't really write anything without knowing the ending. I don't know how people do that. Even with my superhero stuff, I have to know at least where I want to take the characters and what the ending of my story with them will be. I just can't structure stories or character arcs and stuff without knowing the endpoint.

My work as a screenwriter has influenced my fiction. Writing screenplays forces you to consider many elements regarding story structure and other narrative devices that can be used to enhance the infinitely more complex demands of a novel.

Language description and metaphors seem readily available. The things I have to work harder at are plot, pacing, and form.

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

Everything you write makes you better. But if you really need a tip, here's one: a good story begins in opposition to its ending. That means you work out how it finishes first, and then begin the story as far away from that point - in terms of character development - as you can.

You can read a dozen different textbooks or how-to manuals that will tell you the basic rules of what makes a story - a beginning, a middle, and an end.

In fiction, you learn about pacing and how to build tension - which is something you want in a really good nonfiction feature article as well.

I think all good short stories are about what it means to tell a good story.