The process of composition, messing around with paragraphs and trying to make really good prose, is hardwired into my personality.
From Rick Moody
But that incessant drive to be out there in the literary universe that was important to me when I was in my twenties, like going to a Paris Review party or whatever, that seems totally irrelevant now.
So while it is true that I find really dark stuff funny sometimes, it's also true that as a writer of books I want to have the whole range of human emotions.
I'm trying to make sure that there's comedy as well as sadness. It makes the sadness more memorable.
I didn't know how to kill off a character unless I was able, as a narrator, to get really complicated. Because it was a big deal. I'd never killed a character before.
My contention is that that style is just as stylized as an ornate style.
When prose gets too stylized and out of control - and Stein is sometimes a good example - when you don't know what the hell is going on, then it's kind of boring.
The point is to balance on the edge between musicality and content.
It turns out that my memory is just not that great, so for specific scenes with people doing stuff, sometimes I'd have the details all wrong or I couldn't remember what happened exactly, so I just let that be.
I made this list of stuff that it's time for me to try to do.
3 perspectives
2 perspectives
1 perspectives