I think some writers should wait for something to say.
I write by hand in my notebooks and number the drafts, so I know how crazy I can get with this. Some writers, like my teacher Marilynne Robinson, she only writes one draft. I've thought about this a lot; I think it's because she writes it 80 times in her head before it comes out.
I write when I have something to say and not when I don't. My time is better spent if I know I have nothing to say. I don't consider it writer's block; I just don't have anything to say.
People have to follow their own strangeness. The minute they start making their own vision of the world flattened out so everyone can read it, they lose. I encourage people to be as awkward and odd on the page to capture their own way of seeing the world and not trying to see the world for other people.
I'm pretty tight - I rewrite, in some cases, 70 to 80 times before I show it to people.
As a professor I can't teach writing.
I'm constantly trying to figure out how to crack that mystery; how to make a novel that has a sense of immediacy of a short story. I try to do that and I'll try it again, but I'll never get it.
I feel like there are too many words in the world, and I think silence is so much more powerful than the glut of words.
We don't want emotion handed to us - that's not emotion. You have to build and come from the reader's soul.
A novel is like a long relationship and a short story is a brief one that lingers - it lingers powerfully and maybe more powerfully. I think that's true in a lot of cases, most long-term relationships compared to some of the briefer ones - the intensity of those brief ones that end, I think a short story is kind of like that. There's a certain level of intensity that I think is different.
What you can do with a short story that you can't do with a novel is punch someone in the gut, in the best of ways.
I try not to read my own books just because I would rather read somebody else.
My first book came out again - the re-issue from 2001. I was rereading it to make sure that I didn't miss any mistakes, and I didn't know who had written some of these stories. I really didn't. I am a different person now. It's weird. I think if stories are good, they have to have a life of their own that's independent of the writer. I like to think of my characters out there in other peoples' heads. That's a nice thing to think about.
To me, and I'm sure for other writers, too, characters come back and they relive again, but what about those characters who only live for a page or two? Or for five pages or 10 pages. I like to think they're still out there - still living - but for me they kind of die, too. It's kind of sad. I don't think about them anymore unless I give them life again.
I usually have a location and then I put the character there. I love place names. I think I'm tricking myself by being so specific - it suddenly becomes real to me. Just because I say it's Chicago, Illinois doesn't mean it's true, but place names sort of make me grounded and then I can put some people there.
Maybe my work is somewhat divided into family stories, things I know intimately, and then everybody else in the world - the strangers who I am totally fascinated with.
I agree with the Lev Tolstoy quote completely, but I also feel like there's more to it. What is a happy family and an unhappy family? We're probably both of those things at the same time.
I think that maybe happy families don't need stories the way unhappy families need stories. Maybe they're too busy living that they don't actually step back and talk about life like the Anton Chekhov quote. I prefer Anton Chekhov to Lev Tolstoy, and the reason is because of what he leaves out. Sometimes I think Tolstoy had a theory that he was proving and he proved it. Chekhov is more ambiguous.
There's a great Anton Chekhov quote. He says, "The Russian loves recalling life, but he does not love living." That scene has always been something that I have held dear. When something happens, the first thing you want to do is tell it. That's almost more exciting. It's almost simultaneous with the experience; you are already telling something incredible while it's happening. The stories that everybody carries around and repeats, I am really interested in that.
I sometimes wonder if our memories are a myth. We think we remember, but we are remembering the story and not the actual event?
I think anything we do - eating, walking down the street, online shopping - gives you another perspective on writing stories.
I've spent so many years living in one place and imaging another.
I always say writing fiction isn't something you teach. It's something you do, and only experimentation - i.e. doing it, either badly or good sometimes - can help anybody get any better or worse at it.
I have a friend who teaches yoga (or is it pilates?), and she said that I don't seem to live in the moment. And I said, "Exactly!" I'd go nuts if I lived in the moment.
Lot of stories in deceit, how characters deceive other people, but most of all, I think, how they deceive themselves. We're not as tricky as we think we are.
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