Authorial Intrusion Quotes

James Blish told me I had the worst case of "said bookism" (that is, using every word except said to indicate dialogue). He told me to limit the verbs to said, replied, asked, and answered and only when absolutely necessary.

Of course I know that the twins are only words on a page, and I'm certainly not the sort of writer who talks to his characters or harbours any illusions about the creative process. But at the same time, I think it's juvenile and arrogant when literary writers compulsively remind their readers that the characters aren't real. People know that already. The challenge is to make an intelligent reader suspend disbelief, to seduce them into the reality of a narrative.

Don't see the point in reading ghost-written autobiographies, even though some of these published lives may fascinate me. The 'ghost' is always present, manipulating an interview into first-person singular text, and it feels like I'm reading a lie.

If you feel that there's the author and then the character, then the book is not working. People have a habit of identifying the author with the narrator, and you can't, obviously, be all of the narrators in all of your books, or else you'd be a very strange person indeed.

I didn't like filtering the story through me, saying, 'Reader, you'll be safe with me. While it gets a little dangerous, it'll be okay because, after all, you're with me, because I'm a warm convivial voice. But let's be entertained by this horrible stuff.' I didn't like that.

If I wrote a play with four characters every single one of them would talk like me regardless of age or sex.

I usually see the word "metafiction" applied to works that draw attention to their own devices, their own artificiality, in order to mock novelistic convention and show the impossibility of capturing a reality external to the text or whatever.

Meta-fiction doesn't depend on the illusion that you're reading about real people.

In a way, metafiction breaks down the story and makes it less real. But in another respect, by that very breaking down, it actually makes things feel more real than they would to begin with.

What I hate in fiction is when the author knows better than the characters what they should do.

Upton Sinclair is his own King Charles' head. He cannot keep himself out of his writings, try though he may; or, by this time, try though he doesn't.

Hulga the whole while hollering like a half-slaughtered hog. (Attention, students of literature! Alliteration - have you noticed? - is my least vice.)

I like to blur the line between fact and fiction, but not to condescend to the reader by enmeshing her/him into some sort of a postmodern coop.

If a writer is always trying to keep a narrator emitting a tone of complete knowingness, it can become false.

The line of dialogue belongs to the character; the verb is the writer sticking his nose in.

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.

I'm starting to think my narrators' sentences are getting too big for them, and they are getting to sound a bit samey and, more disturbingly, a bit too much like me.