H. W. Brands Quotes

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.

'Phantom' was for me an interesting technique of telling the story. You have one voice that it is in the present telling what is happening, and then there's one voice from the past that's also driving the story forward. And you know that the two story lines will meet eventually.

If you ever want to understand multitasking in prose, James Joyce is your man.

Somehow, you can achieve a directness in the novel that you can't get anywhere else.

A chronicle is very different from history proper.

I almost always use first person voice in my novels. It has its limitations, but it gives a sense of immediacy that's hard to create with an anonymous, all-seeing narrator.

I've always been into 'fast-paced, don't bore 'em, keep it moving along, stick with the story.' You know: tell a story the way I want to hear a story. I find it more rewarding to write for kids, but I also find it a little easier, because you can just let loose a little bit more in terms of fantasy and stuff.

I've always thought that you live in the present, you live in a specific present. You are writing, present tense, so write in the present as it is.

I purposely adopted a style in my storytelling wherein I don't have to explain everything or why the story is moving in a particular way.

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.

Despite the volatile mixture of family, politics and past misdeeds darkening the present, 'Hardball' doesn't have the sharp tang of the early novels or the expansive reach of more recent series installments.

If you tell a story that's only allegory, then it doesn't help you at all. If it doesn't bring some emotional charge, then it's just talking about something.

I enjoy writing personal essays in the way of Charles Lamb because it goes back to the school days when I was good in writing essays.

When I read interviews with people like Kevin Barry or Colin Barrett, who I hugely admire, they don't really seem to come up against the question of likeability even though their characters, in some instances, are really horrible.

If you say in the first chapter that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the second or third chapter it absolutely must go off. If it's not going to be fired, it shouldn't be hanging there.

I fell in love with poetry through storytelling, so my poetry tends to be fairly narrative. I like characters, I like having a beginning, middle, and ending, though not necessarily in that order.

The art of writing fiction is to sail as dangerously close to the truth as possible without sinking the ship

I always try to write on the principle of the iceberg. There is seven-eighths of it underwater for every part that shows.

Mark Twain didn't psychoanalyze Huck Finn or Tom Sawyer. Dickens didn't put Oliver Twist on the couch because he was hungry! Good copy comes out of people, Johnny, not out of a lot of explanatory medical terms.

It is not enough for a story to flow. It has to kind of trickle and glint as it crosses over the stones of the bare facts.

[Beowolf] is considered an epic because of its long speeches, its digressions, its repetition, and its being required.

Tell a story! Don't try to impress your reader with style or vocabulary or neatly turned phrases. Tell the story first!

The framed tale is, in my opinion, one of the most natural ways to tell a story. If you think of it, the conceit of the frame-less story is actually the odd way of doing things. Without the frame, how do you know the context for a story?

There are writers who draw immediate attention to the fact that it's fiction. And I like some of that, but it doesn't really have the power.

The great majority of modern third-person narration is "I" narration very thinly disguised.