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Narrative tension is primarily about withholding information.

Ian Mcewan

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Ian Mcewan
Age: 76
Born: 1948
Born: June 21
Author
Film Producer
Novelist
Playwright
Screenwriter
Writer
Belfast
Ireland
Withholding
Primarily
Tension
Narrative
Information

More quotes by Ian Mcewan

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Looking after children is one of the ways of looking after yourself.
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I like to think that each book I start is a completely new departure But I’ve learned that whatever you do, readers will have no difficulty assimilating it into what you’ve done before.
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You can tell a lot from a person's nails. When a life starts to unravel, they're among the first to go.
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Find you, love you, marry you, and live without shame.
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All she had needed was the certainty of his love, and his reassurance that there was no hurry when a lifetime lay ahead of them.
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But what really happened? The answer is simple: the lovers survive and flourish.
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For the professors in the academy, for the humanities generally, misery is more amenable to analysis: happiness is a harder nut to crack.
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If I could write the perfect novella I would die happy.
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He who hesitates is not only lost, but miles from the next exit.
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Let the guilty bury the innocent, and let no one change the evidence
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But it was too interesting, too new, too flattering, too deeply comforting to resist, it was a liberation to be in love and say so, and she could only let herself go deeper.
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When anything can happen, everything matters.
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At the back of my mind I had a sense of us sitting about waiting for some terrible event, and then I would remember that it had already happened.
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It is not the first duty of the novelist to provide blueprints for insurrection, or uplifting tales of successful resistance for the benefit of the opposition. The naming of what is there is what is important.
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Writing a novel resembles a journey with only the sketchiest of maps.
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It's the essence of a degenerating mind periodically, to lose all sense of continuous self, and therefore any regard for what others think of your lack of continuity.
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It's good to get your hands dirty a bit and to test how you see things at a given point. And it's very pleasing after writing something like 'Atonement' or 'On Chesil Beach,' which are historical, to get involved in some plausible re-enactment of the here and now.
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You can spin stories out of the ways people understand and misunderstand each other.
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These were everyday sounds magnified by darkness. And darkness was nothing - it was not a substance, it was not a presence, it was no more than an absence of light.
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None of us really either know the circumstances of our death or are likely to exert as much control over it as we would like to, but we can certainly have a little more say in it if we are terminally ill than we have at the moment. That's the element of dignity, but sure, life is very hard to organise even when you are fit and healthy.
Ian Mcewan