Jo Nesbo Quotes

Toni Morrison has a habit, perhaps traceable to the pernicious influence of William Faulkner, of plunging into the narrative before the reader has a clue to what is going on.

The expected vertical line of Ikiru's narrative breaks when Kurosawa does a flash-forward in the middle of the film.

If you keep having to dip into the story's past to explain the present, then there's a good chance your real story's in the past, and you're just using the present as a vehicle to deliver us there.

I'm so tired of stories starting, 'Maud Jones was walking her dog down Broadway.' You've got to go over to the back page somewhere to finally find out the damn dog was run over by a truck. Get the thing told, for heaven's sake. Everybody doesn't have to be an O. Henry.

I don't usually like teen novels written in the present tense, particularly those told from a first-person viewpoint. Too many writers seem to believe that using either or both devices automatically imbues their stories with deep seriousness and a contemporary feel.

Flashback episodes are a tried-and-true sitcom device, but they always work!

Whatever the case, oftentimes, for a story to feel complete to me, I need more than one point of view.

I've been told by people I respect that flashbacks only work if they have their own narrative, but they can't be part of the present narrative.

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.

I like the fact that by mimicking the way memory works, a writer can actually write in a fluid way - one solid scene doesn't have to fall on another solid scene, you can just have a fragment that then dovetails into another one that took place 30 years apart from it.

I've been told, and I think I recognize it, that there's a cinematic quality to my writing, with a sense of image and place and scene - and, some would say, my tendency to finish my books the way Hollywood finishes its films.

I've always been really attracted to playing with structure. To take the story of 'Fargo' and break it up in such a way that's it's not linear, per se.

My idea in terms of managing a narrative, or in thinking in my creative life, is that you could easily argue that the past, the present and the future all occur simultaneously, and if you can postulate that, then you're not strictly bound to a linear narrative.

As a writer, one of the things we all learned from the movies was a kind of compression that didn't exist before people were used to watching films. For instance, if you wanted to write a flashback in a novel, you once had to really contextualize it a lot, to set it up. Now, readers know exactly what you're doing. Close-ups, too.

It's so difficult to write in motion and get rid of the past tense, and also to create a sense of impermanence.

I just do the best I can and write something interesting, to tell stories in an interesting way and move forward from there.

Listen to great storytellers; slowly, you will learn about voice, timing, tension, structure, climax - all the things you need to tell stories that will capture the imagination of your audience.

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

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.

Playing with different genres and perspectives and ways of telling stories is one of the perks of being a novelist, but at the same time, I want precision. And in order to be precise about stuff, you have to get personal. Symbolism is very boring.

Historians tell the story of the past, novelists the story of the present.

Movies have to handle time very efficiently. They're about stringing scenes together in the present. Novels aren't necessarily about that.

I go to great lengths to make certain situations feel right to the reader.

The present hardly exists, after all-it becomes the past even as it happens. A tricky medium, time - and central to the concerns of fiction.

Some stories don't have a clear beginning, middle and end.