Alex Garland Quotes

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.

Writing in the first person automatically gives you a point of view.

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.

I'm very comfortable writing in the first person; it dives into the character in a way that's difficult if you're writing in the third person.

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

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.'

First person narrative is a very effective tool but you have to know as a writer how to make it work.

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

I intentionally approached each story in 'Killing and Dying' in a different way, and that includes the writing process.

The omniscient narrator is a bizarre technique, when you think about it, and no one uses it much anymore. But for the novels I want to write, it's the only approach that makes sense to me.

The way that I see third person is it's actually first person. Writing for me is all voice work. Third person narrative is just as character-driven as first person narrative for me in terms of a voice. I don't write very much in third person.

I'm not sure that all books aren't that way. I think that might apply to any book I was writing. The book was kind of the product of this enormous infatuation I had, not only with the office and office politics, but with perspective, and trying to tell a story from as wide a range of perspectives as you possibly can. I tried to capture it all with the first-person plural, but once I settled on that, I used it to tell the story from as many angles as I could. I guess, to put it romantically, it was about a love affair with the craft of perspective.

One of the most difficult things in writing a novel or anything at all is to choose the point of view from which it's going to be told.

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 harder to write in the third person but the advantage is you move around better.

I have also led you astray by talking of technique as if it were something that could be separated from the rest of the story. Technique can't operate at all, of course, except on believable material.

It doesn't matter to me whether I write in a man's voice or a woman's, or first or third person for that matter. Those choices come down to the story and I just go with it.

I wouldn't like to be a character in one of my books!

I like to write first-person because I like to become the character I'm writing.

I've written short stories from male perspectives before, and I've never had a problem with it as long as I've understood the character's emotions and motivations.

The craft of writing is all the stuff that you can learn through school; go to workshops and read books. Learn characterization, plot and dialogue and pacing and word choice and point of view. Then there's also the art of it which is sort of the unknown, the inspiration, the stuff that is noncerebral.

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 write. This is what I do. My job is to sit down with my vocabulary, select words, and decide what order they should be placed in an attempt to keep someone's attention and perhaps provide them with a laugh or two along the way.

I suspect there are two kinds of novelists. Those who have a point of view and have something to say and then write a novel in order to say that thing, and those of us who write the book in order to find out what we think about that thing.

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