Jesmyn Ward Quotes

They say truth is sometimes stranger than fiction, but there's such a thing as believability when you're writing a novel.

My action follows my characters. If a character is a cop, you cannot be posing all the time, you cannot fly off the roof because it doesn't make any sense - it's not practical.

Everything in a story should be credible.

I'm writing about real things. Real people. Real characters. You have to believe what I write about is true or you wouldn't pay any attention at all. Sometimes it's me, or a composite of me and other people. Sometimes it's not me at all.

It's really about, oh come on, this guy wouldn't say that or he wouldn't do that, you know, it's about the characters, about the story, about the situation.

The very best way I can make any reader believe in the nuts and bolts of an art form... is to know the mechanics, to make the characters grounded in convincing detail.

A lot of times as writers, you want to come up with the best possible story, and you bend it according to what you want to happen. I think one of the things that I always try to think about is what would really happen in a situation, what feels real.

Even if it happened in real life - and oftentimes, especially if it happened in real life - it might not work in fiction.

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

I want my fiction to seem real.

The only difference between reality and fiction is that fiction needs to be credible.

There was no difference between my characters and the life my readers were going to have to face.

I didn't want readers to have to make allowances for what they couldn't see, but to be able to say to themselves that the fabric of the magic detailed was perfectly believable.

I've never liked watching real-life couples play couples onscreen or onstage. It takes me out of the story.

I think anything goes in fiction as long as it fits within the interior logic of the work itself and is presented in a disciplined manner.

In a traditional TV show or movie, your hero is always where the action is. But in real life, at the end of the movie 'Fargo,' when Bill Macy is arrested, Marge is nowhere to be found because it's a different jurisdiction, and she wouldn't be there. I took that to heart.

I think that those are the things that you can uniquely do with film that are difficult to do anywhere else: they can bring a picture to life, give it a natural and historical context and make you feel that everything else is suddenly credible.

It isn't as if a writer merely records life as it unfurls. Reality does not automatically transcribe as literature; real people are not shapely, compelling characters to be harvested. Charming facts and sharp observations rarely slide seamlessly into whatever narrative is at hand.

Sometimes I read a script and it's obvious from early on that it's one where the suspension of disbelief has to develop strongly from page one. Some are more reality-based.

I create fictional narratives, but it's based on literal people.

Good fiction is made of that which is real, and reality is difficult to come by.

Successful fiction does not need to be validated by 'real life'; I cringe whenever a writer is asked how much of a novel is 'real'.

Ironically, in today's marketplace successful nonfiction has to be unbelievable, while successful fiction must be believable.

They say that every writer, they write about himself, and I think that to a certain extent that is true. But also we are creators of fiction.

I'm not interested in cutting the feet off my characters or stretching them to make them fit my certain political view.