The thing that fiction can do is look from the inside out rather than from the outside in. Even memoir leaves me somewhat frustrated. I think now we need a poet to uncover what isn't on the surface.
From Alice McDermott
Publishing a short story can sometimes feel like shouting into the dark... your words come out, and then nothing... but I don't think that's why I tend to write novels rather than stories.
Read everything. Write all the time. And if you can do anything else that gives you equal pleasure and allows you to sleep soundly at night, do that instead. The writing life is an odd one, to say the least.
My own 'sentimental favorite' is always the novel I haven't yet written - I suppose that's the one I consider my 'masterpiece' as well.
Being Irish-American myself, Irish-American material is readily at hand to me.
I know Irish-American people. I know what their homes look like. I know what they have for dinner. I know how they turn a phrase.
I think place and time for me is often a matter of convenience, something I can use to another end rather than something I'm trying to define because it's somehow fascinating to me in itself. It's more what the place can do for the larger goals I have for the work.
Memory is not pure. Memories told are not pure memories; memories told are stories. The storyteller will change them. I've always been interested in that.
I've got to hear the rhythm of the sentences; I want the music of the prose. I want to see ordinary things transformed not by the circumstances in which I see them but by the language with which they're described. That's what I love when I read.
A perfect poem you can't pin down and say, 'This is exactly what it meant to me.' It's not a self-help manual.
4 perspectives
3 perspectives
1 perspectives