Sabaa Tahir Quotes

What's great about 'Game of Thrones' is they change the perspective, the POV, all the time. So you will have one story told by one character and you'll go, 'Oh my God, horrible', and then maybe the season after you have the same story told but from the person you thought was just the most horrible, vile creature.

Some novels present a story form many points of view. Most movies tell only one person's side of the story. Sometime it's easy to use the strongest point of view, or find the character with the most dramatic experience. It depends on which themes the scriptwriter wants to explore.

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

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.

You never want to be in a position where your reader feels like you're passing judgment on your own characters. Any novel where you feel like the author is talking to the reader over the characters' heads is in a bad place.

My readers often tell me that what they admire about my books is my ability to write from so many points of view. My challenge to myself is whether I'll ever be able to write a novel just from one point of view. It seems impossible.

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.

It's often the case that the most strained moments in books are the very beginning and the very end - the getting in and the getting out. The ending, especially: it's awkward, as if the writer doesn't know when the book is over and nervously says it all again.

I normally write in the first person, and my narrators are as real to me as any of the people I have worked with. They live and breathe in my imagination.

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.

I always think first about the nature of the story. When I had the idea for 'The Namesake,' I felt that it had to be a novel - it couldn't work as a story.

It is the creator of fiction's point of view; it is the character who interests him. Sometimes he wants to convince the reader that the story he is telling is as interesting as universal history.

I've always enjoyed that kind of thing - thinking about the production of narrative and why it is that when we read a novel, we don't notice the fact that someone who might be very close-mouthed or tight-lipped is perfectly willing to tell us a story in 600 or 700 pages.

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

There is one plot point in one of the 'D'Arnath' books that I don't think I handled as well as I could have. Am I going to tell you which one? No way!

'The Last Of Us,' to me, is just amazing storytelling, because everything's from the character point of view, which even movies don't really do successfully a lot of the time.

My stories are character driven.

I look for two things when I am about to launch into a book. First, there has to be a dramatic arc to the story itself that will carry me, and the reader, from beginning to end. Second, the story has to weave through larger themes that can illuminate the world of the subject.

There is nothing that's been in any of my novels that, in my view, hasn't been either illuminating surroundings or defining a character or moving a plot.

Like 'Metro' and 'Motor,' 'Troublemaker' is written in first person. The only narration that happens is Barney speaking to the reader/thinking in her head. First person was a big challenge in the graphic novel because we want both men and women of all ages to enjoy 'Troublemaker.'

I once took a workshop with Jim Shepard, and he has this term, 'rate-of-revelation,' that has come to mean a lot to me: 'the pace at which we're learning crucial emotional information about the stories' central figures.' An ever-increasing rate-of-revelation is good; a stagnant r-of-r is not.

I write as if I'm someone reading the book - often people ask if I write one strand first and then go back and seed in the other, but I don't think I could keep track of who knows what, and the tension would come out wrong, so the answer is no - I write it more or less in the order you read it.

I've always kind of gravitated toward characters who are a bit distant from the narrator or the point-of-view characters, so that's kind of important to me, to set up a different character who would be the point-of-view character for the story.

Whenever I write for television, I plan the story on whiteboard wallpaper in my office, using a system created by the American writer Dan Harmon. It's remarkably simple: a character wants something; they enter a new world and adapt to it; they get what they want, re-enter the old world and change.

Great novels have great characterization no matter what. But multiple points of view let me examine characters from entirely different perspectives, allowing me to learn more about everyone in the process.