John Ciardi Quotes

A novel can do something that films and TV usually can't - a glimpse inside the characters' heads. I write very tight third person point of view, so the reader is right behind the eyes of each character, seeing what they see and feeling what they feel.

There are very few works of fiction that take you inside the heads of all characters. I tell my writing students that one of the most important questions to ask yourself when you begin writing a story is this: Whose story is it? You need to make a commitment to one or perhaps a few characters.

I think one of the hardest things about doing a book in the first person is that to a certain extent each day, when you begin to do your work, you're climbing into somebody else's skin.

Show the reader what the character thinks about, and then the reader will think about it too.

The first-person viewpoint is more enjoyable to write, because it lets me meander more freely, and it can reveal more of the character's self-delusions. Really all the advantages are with first-person, so I'm sorry I don't get to pick and choose.

For me, it's important that I experience and feel what the characters are feeling. So I put myself in those moments, in their thoughts, and let it happen naturally. I write what I feel.

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.

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.

When I'm writing from a character's viewpoint, in essence I become that character; I share their thoughts, I see the world through their eyes and try to feel everything they feel.

I don't really distinguish between sympathy and honesty when I'm writing. The two go together - I'm interested in inhabiting my characters, seeing the world through their eyes.

First person allows deeper insight into the protagonist's character. It allows the reader to identify more fully with the protagonist and to share her world quite intimately. So it suits a story focused on one character's personal journey. However, first person shuts out insights into other characters.

My job is to see the world through the character's eyes.

I identify in some measure with each of my characters.

Point of view gets me. If I can feel like a character rather than a reader, I'll read that book.

Sometimes I'll ask the book writer to write a monologue, not to be performed, just as if they were notes for the character.

As a filmmaker, you're always supposed to be with your characters, in all movies, even if they're villains.

By the end, you should be inside your character, actually operating from within somebody else, and knowing him pretty well, as that person knows himself or herself. You're sort of a predator, an invader of people.

Don't think about how your characters sound, but how they see. Watch the world through their eyes - study the extraordinary and the mundane through their particular perspective. Walk around the block with them, stroll the rooms they live in, figure out what objects on the cluttered dining room table they would inevitably stare at the longest, and then learn why.

Early on, I settled on the first-person strategy as a way to deal with exposition and world-description issues. As long as the book is, it could have been far longer had I gone with an omniscient third-person narrator, or multiple point-of-view characters, since either of those would have enabled me to impart much more detailed information about the history and geography of the world.

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.

When you are writing, you have to love all your characters. If you're writing something from a minor character's point of view, you really need to stop and say the purpose of this character isn't to be somebody's sidekick or to come in and put the horse in the stable. The purpose of this character is you're getting a little window into that character's life and that character's day. You have to write them as if they're not a minor character, because they do have their own things going on.

I think the ultimate goal is that when we're off-stage, we know everything our character is thinking. Hopefully when we are on-stage, our thoughts are our character's thoughts because we really know that much about them.

There's a kind of acting that goes on in my head when I'm writing a character where I put myself in their place.

I would so hate to be a first-person character! Always on your guard, always having people read your thoughts!

When you have a set of characters, you have to fall in love with them and care about them as each individual character.