Svetlana Alexievich Quotes

I make a rod for my own back because people see my novels as quasi documentaries. But it is never history that's the main event of my books. It's my characters.

Conventional forms of narrative allow for different points of view, but for this book I wanted a structure whereby each of the main characters contributed a distinctive version of the story.

A novel requires a certain kind of world-building and also a certain kind of closure, ultimately. Whereas with a short story you have this sense that there are hinges that the reader doesn't see.

Having written for film and television, I had little interest in turning 'The Good Father' into a Hollywood thriller. I was writing a novel, and novels demand that the writer goes deeper, both emotionally and thematically.

I love writing letters. In order to write a novel in first person, I think I needed an addressee.

You can throw a novel into focus with one overheard line.

Probably every book I read influenced me in some small way. Authors like Jan Westcott, Kathleen Winsor, Catherine Cookson, Georgette Heyer, and even Barbara Cartland taught me to write character-driven stories.

When you write a novel, you never have to be in the service of the reader. My only concern with my books is that the world that's created be as logical and whole as possible.

A novel, in the end, is a container, a shape which you are trying to pour your story into.

I love to read. And right now I'm on my last hundred pages of 'The Corrections' by Jonathan Franzen, and I really enjoyed it. His writing is just - he's one of those writers where you just go, 'There are people just meant to be novel writers.'

Novels demand a certain complexity of narrative and scope, so it's necessary for the characters to change.

Television and film are such streamlined story mediums. You can't really meander about, whereas a novel is an interior experience.

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.

I am a newspaper columnist and a professional screenwriter, but my real love is the novel for all the room it has for characters to come alive and breathe and face their challenges.

With novels, you're representing things. You're not explaining.

Whatever the case, oftentimes, for a story to feel complete to me, I need more than one point of view.

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.

Characters develop as the book progresses, but any that start to bore me end up in the wastepaper basket. In real life, we may have to put up with tedious people, but not in novels.

Back in my 20s, when I wrote 'A Place of Greater Safety,' the French Revolution novel, I thought, 'I'll always have to write historical novels because I can't do plots.' But in the six years of writing that novel, I actually learned to write, to invent things.

I feel a bigger sense of fulfillment when writing a novel, and short stories are more about instant gratification.

One of the challenges is creating characters. I am trying to compose my sentences to express epic events happening to ordinary people.

First person narrative is a very effective tool but you have to know as a writer how to make it work.

I'm looking forward to writing more novels for young adults.

First-person narrators is the way I know how to write a book with the greatest power and chance of artistic success.

Everything you write makes you better. But if you really need a tip, here's one: a good story begins in opposition to its ending. That means you work out how it finishes first, and then begin the story as far away from that point - in terms of character development - as you can.