Quote

I go back to a very specific aspect of the Midwest - small towns surrounded by farmland. They make a good stage for what I like to write about, i.e., roads and houses, bridges and rivers and weather and woods, and people to whom strange or interesting things happen, causing problems they must overcome.

People are more aware now of cities and of different ways of life. I suppose the writing I do is a bit in the past, and I'm not sure it's the kind of writing I would do if I were starting now.

The biggest hurdle to writing Fargo Rock City was that I couldn't afford a home computer - I had to get a new job so I could buy a computer. It could all change though. In five years, I could be back at some daily newspaper, which wouldn't be so bad.

I write about people in small towns; I don't write about people living in big cities. My kind of storytelling depends upon people that have time to talk to each other.

My favorite stories are about kids who refuse to give up; their homes and schools may have been destroyed; they've probably had to rely on themselves more than a lot of adults do, and they've resisted the many bad alternatives that city life offers to poor teens.

Writing about what happened to my brother and to my family was awful. It was hard to look back at how much suffering there was and at how certain bad situations were made worse by our decisions.

I am haunted by what my life would have been had I not had the courage in my early twenties to leave Pittsburgh for New York City and really commit to being a writer. Pittsburgh is both post-industrial and provincial, and the opportunities there are limited. It would have been quite easy to simply drift through life.

I'm a city boy. I grew up in a big city, in Birmingham, and I want to write about a city. It's much richer tapestry for me than green fields. Fields and wild life make me feel ill. I don't like - I don't want to write about that stuff.

I would try to write my own story about some East Coast suburbanite having an affair or something like that. So I did that for maybe two years or so, and it just wasn't working for me at all.