Writing Perspective Quotes

I think everything I write is from an atheist perspective. I mean, it's partly from an atheist perspective because I'm an atheist, and I'm just not really interested in religious-based questions.

Not to any really influential effect, but certainly there have been comments that have surprised me. It's surprising sometimes to get particular perspectives on your work, and it's enlightening sometimes to know that non-writers and readers out there have certain assumptions about everything that I both want to keep in mind and want to forget about why I write, and about the connection between me as a private person and the stuff that I think about on the page.

When I'm writing in my bedroom, in a bar, at my kitchen table or wherever, I'm conjuring it all up on the page. That's all well and good, but it is going to be a limited perspective at that point and time. Occasionally, what I write might read really well initially, but then you change your mind while hunting for locations when you discover settings which offer even better opportunities for drama or dramatic staging.

I have yet to see a piece of writing, political or non-political, that doesn't have a slant. All writing slants the way a writer leans, and no man is born perpendicular, although many men are born upright.

It's to a writer's advantage to contain within himself elements of each sex, or any sex. It's to his advantage because it makes him able to write from the female point of view as well as the male. In some cases, of course, you will find some homosexual writers who can only write from a f - - -'s point of view. But I don't regard myself as a f - - -! Some people may. Also audiences wanted escapism. They don't like too much protest or criticism of their way of life.

You take something from your past that you're somewhat ashamed about and you write about it from another character's point of view.

Readers tell me that my novels are filled with significant mothers. Do I realize this? Do I do it on purpose? The truth is, I don't. I think of myself as a writer of family stories. I write more often than not from a male point of view, and I usually begin by focusing on siblings, spouses, even fathers, before I think about the mothers.

I don't think of the characters as being good or bad because that doesn't help me as a writer.

The planet is populated by human beings, of which there are only two sexes, and the role of the writer is to explore otherness, other realities. So the idea of a man exploring what it's like to be a woman doesn't strike me as being that wild or crazy an idea.

When I write, I aim in my mind not toward New York but toward a vague spot a little to the east of Kansas.

I've written short stories in first person, but you have so much more control writing in third person. Third person, you know what everybody's thinking. First person is very limiting, and I could never sustain a first person novel before.

I think, when I'm writing, I have a more clinical view than I do when I'm reading. I like pretending to be God and basically determining the fate of my characters. But as a reader, I'm a sucker. I'm very sentimental. I get upset when people that I like die. And yet I have killed off characters in my books quite heartlessly, and sometimes found that readers were very upset by it.

I've only written two novels, neither of them published, where the book is dominated by a male point of view; in the 'Onyx Court' series, it's split roughly 50/50.

I started writing a novel from the monster's point of view. It has its own difficulties but, I'm ashamed to say, it's much easier writing from a psychopath's point of view than from that of their empathetic opposite.

I find it to be easier to write from a man's point of view.

Writing from a teen's perspective is easy as pie. At least I've actually been a teen. I've never been a woman, or an ethnic minority, or a weary old man. If anything, writing from the perspective of a child is probably easier for me. When I was a kid everyone thought I was so clever and precocious. Now that I'm adult, everyone thinks that I'm kinda odd and childish.

To write is to look for very particular, specific points of view on reality.

I think, as a writer, you see the big picture, and as an actor, you're thinking of all the minutiae, all the very small details.

As a youngster, when I started writing and stuff, I did actually write more from other people's perspectives. When I hit 18 and something happened to me that hurt me, I discovered that writing the truth is really therapeutic and amazing.

I do not believe that I will ever write an adult novel from an animal's point of view unless someday it becomes suddenly appealing to me to make a narrator a mentally ill pet. Never say never.

I report as a machine; I write as a person. That clear dichotomy softens the transition.

I still write the same way and have the same perspective.

Politics disappears; it vanishes. What remains constant is human life. So I try to develop a perspective in my writing where politics is just one of the pieces of furniture in this furnished world. It is not the purpose. It is not the goal.

I'm a very girlie girl, but I often find the heroes of my books trying to take over the story. In truth, I enjoy writing the male point of view more than any other.

I was able to work out all sorts of attitudes to style and event and character, all of which affected the way I came to think about my own writing. I believe that all good writers are original.