Min Jin Lee Quotes

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

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

I'm always telling my students, don't - don't worry so much third person, first person. It doesn't make that much difference.

The third person narrator, instead of being omniscient, is like a constantly running surveillance tape.

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.

I like to think that I am telling a story rather than writing it.

My fiction-writing DNA shows in how I think about prose, how I think about the page, how I think nonfiction stories should work. And every piece of nonfiction I write, I want it to have fictional texture.

In character, as it were, the writer settles for an impression of what happened rather than creating the sense of the thing happening.

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.

The novel avoids the sublime and seeks out the interesting.

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.

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

I know that my tendency is to be linear, and I'm trying to find ways to subvert that. And so in 'Bellocq's Ophelia' my device for subverting it was to tell the story and then to tell it again; it always circles back to this one moment, and it's not linear, but it's round in that way, and much of 'Native Guard' is like that.

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

My lip curls in a snide reflex whenever I hear that a new novel is written from the point of view of a child or a monster, a lunatic or an animal. I immediately expect a nasty coyness of tone, cheesy artifice, the world through cardboard 3-D lenses.

With novels, you're representing things. You're not explaining.

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.

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

You spend so much time as a writer telling straight and linear stories.

My first attempt at writing was very unstructured and formless, with shifting points of view. I was trying to understand how long form might work, and I realized I had something shapeless. It was a total car wreck. But I still felt I could pull it off. So I ditched that attempt and started writing in the opposite manner, in first person, with a driving narrative.

I've always written in first person. It gives the readers more insight.

I have no policy, for or against: only a personal style. Which is to say, I use them when I think it's appropriate to; for example, an internal monologue by a locquacious and verbose narrator is more likely to be larded with adverbs than an exchange of instant messages between cops at a crime scene.

The language fictional characters use is chosen for effect, at least if the author is concentrating.

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.

Point-of-view is a matter that readers rarely pay attention to, yet it's one of the most important story decisions an author makes.