I really don't know enough about the structure of fiction.
A good novel is an indivisible sum; every scene, sequence and passage of a good novel has to involve, contribute to and advance all three of its major attributes: theme, plot, characterization.
I don't think of myself as a metafictional writer at all. I think of myself as a classic writer, a realist writer, who tends to have flights of fancy at times, but nevertheless, my feet are mostly on the ground.
Outlines are the last resource of bad fiction writers who wish to God they were writing masters' theses.
The more fiction you read and write, the more you'll find your paragraphs forming on their own.
A written discourse on any subject is bound to contain much that is fanciful.
And I sense it was a rather constructed, almost half narrative fiction film in some ways. A lot of it was staged and manipulated to get those things in there that I knew to be strong.
Facts are the soil from which the story grows. Imagination is a last resort.
Even though I was making documentaries, my films had fictional elements to them. I think I like blurring those distinctions because so much of what we see on television purports to be the truth, but it's often largely imaginary - or wishful thinking, or any number of less honorable things.
Anyone telling about his travels must be a liar, . . . for if a traveler doesn't visit his narrative with the spirit and techniques of fiction, no one will want to hear it.
You have to be a bit of a liar to tell a story the right way.
Writing fiction is an act of imagination and fantasizing, and it's not relating in prose what you've been doing for the last two or three years.
I write about my life and my own experience, but I also write about things that I have no knowledge of whatsoever.
The novel should be understood as a structure built to accommodate the greatest possible amount of cool stuff.
What's most explosive about historical fiction is to use the fictional elements to pressure the history to new insights.
I feel that discussing story-writing in terms of plot, character, and theme is like trying to describe the expression on a face by saying where the eyes, nose, and mouth are.
People don't like to say Fantasy they say Magic Realism which means Fantasy written by somebody I went to university with.
I am not an autobiographical writer. I'll take little elements here and there from things that I've actually experienced-counting eyelashes on a sleeping beauty, for example.
I draw on my memories but blended with a lot of fantasy.
Any fiction should be a story. In any story there are three elements: persons, a situation, and the fact that in the end something has changed. If nothing has changed, it isn't a story.
I do like putting scenario and story first, and I actually like masking whatever I want to say in the guise of genre.
Go over to Greece with the Iliad and Odyssey. These have elements of history, and they have non-historical elements. It's very difficult to pull them apart. And I think there's not much reason to.
Most historians are engaged in fiction.
