Roy Kesey Quotes

• The biggest experiment there - and I was convinced for a really long time that it was going to fail horribly - had to do with this weird thing I do every now and then. Like everyone else, as a reader there are certain things that really rub me the wrong way in fiction - pet bugbears, let's call them.

  Roy Kesey

  Long, Pet, Fiction

  Source: therumpus.net

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• We should absolutely be concerned with ethical questions - to exactly the same degree as everyone else. It's never my intention to sneak any kind of sermon into a story - I've got no business preaching, and besides, that kind of thing plays poorly in fiction, always has.

  Roy Kesey

  Ethical Questions, Play, Degrees

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• I didn't intentionally emplace the raw material needed for political/allegorical readings into any of the first drafts, but sooner or later I saw it coming, and I did intentionally not cut it from some of the final drafts. In other words, I'm not particularly interested in encouraging readers to read certain stories that way, but I want to make sure that route's accessible should anyone be so inclined.

  Roy Kesey

  Reading, Cutting, Political

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• When you spend so much time trying to father well, and failing, and trying again, and hopefully failing better, it's going to seep into your work. And when you give yourself permission to explore the grottiest bits of your psyche (like Louis CK) (who totally stole that move from me) (not really), to exaggerate the edge of the rustiest blades of your IRL mind, you'll occasionally come up with something that holds real power.

  Roy Kesey

  Father, Real, Moving

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• I start every first draft with voice rather than theme or image or even character as such, so it isn't like I'm ever rubbing my hands, cackling, "The dad is really going to take it on the chin in this one!" Not in terms of any given story, and certainly not in terms of the collection as a whole.

  Roy Kesey

  Dad, Character, Hands

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• What I like about organizing things that way is that each story gets nearly full reign over its own space, but all of them are hung on a single string - the loosely-reined voice mentioned above. Thus the collection jogs away from suzerainty and past federation toward, I guess, alliance. Or maybe call each story a separate house on a single street? Or it's all a line of dive bars on some wharf front? What the hell, let's call reading the collection a pub crawl, but with words.

  Roy Kesey

  Reading, Past, Voice

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• The most basic organizing principle was pretty straightforward, and is frankly pretty common: the shorter of what are by my lights the two most engaging stories goes first, the longer of the two goes at the end, and everything else goes in the middle.

  Roy Kesey

  Light, Two, Principles

  Source: therumpus.net

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• For whatever reason, thus far it's been important to me not to write that kind of collection. Which means that I've spent months playing tic-tac-notecard, trying to get the stories in an order whereby stories that are similar in any given way (diction, narrative stance, setting, plot) are separated by others that aren't.

  Roy Kesey

  Writing, Mean, Order

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• Very often, or perhaps more often, and even in very good collections - even in some of the best collections ever written, I would argue - it's because our "voicier" writers hew so closely to one given set of dictional tics that we as readers can't read the books all the way through in a single sitting, because if we did, the stories and their narrators would all start to bleed together.

  Roy Kesey

  Book, Together, Narrators

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• You know how some people say that they can only read one story a day from this or that collection? If that's simply the result of the great tension and power condensed into each piece, all well and good.

  Roy Kesey

  People, Stories, Pieces

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• Some writers keep a tighter rein on that than others. For short story collections I'm definitely in the loose-rein camp.

  Roy Kesey

  Stories, Short Story, Reins

  Source: therumpus.net

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• Realism's anxieties are not my anxieties, but I think I've had its tools close at hand all along. It may be that I'm reaching for them more often than I used to. On the other hand, I'm making no promises for the future. The material itself always gets the last word.

  Roy Kesey

  Thinking, Hands, Anxiety

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• If you're paying attention to human interactions - to the gap between who we are and who we think we are, or the gap between what happened and what we remember - you're going to end up thinking (obliquely or otherwise) about what it means to act ethically, and I think that's all to the good.

  Roy Kesey

  Mean, Thinking, Remember You

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

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