The thing I am attracted to is just good writing and stories that are based somewhat in reality.
Having been a cameraman, I think about, 'Well, if this was real, how would this be shot?' I try to inject as much realism as much as possible.
As a writer, you're making a pact with the reader; you're saying, 'Look, I know and you know that if this book was really a murder investigation, it would be a thousand pages long and would be very dull, and you would be very unhappy with the ending.'
It's always thrilling to encounter the sweep of time in a work of fiction in a way that feels authentic and real.
I want my fiction to seem real.
There are two strains, I think, in American playwriting, of importance. One is traditional narrative realism, which is definitely my strain, and then the other great contribution is American musical theater, which is a whole other kettle of fish.
The problem with fiction, it has to be plausible. That's not true with non-fiction.
I've never believed it's a fiction writer's job to create an exact replica of the past, a diorama the reader can step right into. But it is my responsibility to learn everything of the world I'm writing about, to become an expert in the politics and history that formed my characters' identities.
In documentaries, there's a truth that unfolds unnaturally, and you get to chronicle it. In narratives, you have to create the situations so that the truth will come out.
I abhor crime novels in which the main character can behave however he or she pleases, or do things that normal people do not do, without those actions having social consequences.
The illusion is an agreement between the reader and writer that this [story] will be like life. The emotional temperature drops when you have footnotes.
It is essential to naturalist doctrine that literature, to be good, must, finally, be the author's experience worked out literally.
I think a lot of people want me to be like the characters in the books: they want that kind of congruence.
What interests me about fiction is, in part, its flickering edge between realism and where a tear in the fabric of a story lets in some other sort of light.
Louis de Bernires is in the direct line that runs through Dickens and Evelyn Waugh. . .he has only to look into his world, one senses, for it to rush into reality, colours and touch and taste.
What is most important to me is that my narrator's voice is believable, and that, though it is clearly an absolute fiction, it has the emotional resonance of memoir.
I believe in storytelling, not story-selling. I want people to believe the characters are real. So I'm a realist.
The kind of theater that I do is sort of 'narrative realism,' which I think in the broadest sense is legitimate to say is mainstream. I mean, in a certain sense, Suzan-Lori's plays have had mainstream levels of success. But Suzan-Lori is in some ways not a narrative realist.
The problem with a lot of narrative films is that they're not real enough.
That's one of the reasons why 'Lost' has to end: because we can't sit around and envision, 'What is the flashback for Jack in year nine?' It doesn't realistically exist.
Sex can no longer be the germ, the seed of fiction. Sex is an episode, most properly conveyed in an episodic manner, quickly, often ironically. It is a bursting forth of only one of the cells in the body of the omnipotent I, the one who hopes by concentration of tone and voice to utter the sound of reality.
