Zitat des Tages von Darin Strauss:
My first book is about twins who are attached: two people who are joined and can't escape each other.
For the fiction students I teach, one of the most common mistakes is to start in the wrong place. Often the actual story doesn't begin until about a third of the way into their narratives. They start off instead with excessive scene-setting, metaphysical speculation, introducing nonessential dramatis personae, throat-clearing, etc.
In Minneapolis, I learned that there are more theaters per square mile than in any U.S. city but New York, and we also had great Midwestern beef in our salads in a plaza overlooking the national headquarters of Target, Inc.
I went to Aspen right after school and got a freelance gig writing articles for the 'Aspen Times.' I was their nightlife correspondent. They paid me fifty bucks an article.
It's good training for a novelist to try to discern the truth about a place after only a few glimpses of it.
My prayer is improvised - though like some standard jazz performance, the improv happens within pretty strict parameters - and asks for nothing.
Memoirs are - memory is - rarely 100 percent accurate. Any autobiography is a construct, ballpark, even unnatural. Private diaries, too, can be unreliable - a detail that matters only if the diary is read.
In the worst memoirs, you can feel the author justifying himself - forgiving himself - in every paragraph. In the best memoirs, the author is tougher on him- or herself than his or her readers will ever be.
In order for a narrative to work, the primary character should have a concrete desire - a need that drives her story - and the story's writer should make this goal known to the reader pretty early in the narrative.
I'm very strict in my belief that non-fiction should be truthful, and fiction is for invented narratives.
Surprisingly, Manhattan casts a sort of undersized shadow onto Long Island. Where I grew up, everyone seemed totally disconnected from the city - ours could have been any suburb, anywhere - though when traffic was thin, it took us only half an hour to get into midtown.
I have twin six-year-old boys. Have no mojo. The closest thing to a mojo I have is five minutes of peace.
I delivered Chinese food on Long island, which is pretty depressing. I lived with my parents and did that for six months. I got a job a few towns over from mine so I wouldn't have to see people from my high school.
I'm really wary of self-help books.
My training and my inclination is to invent.
Regret doesn't budge things; it seems crazy that the force of all that human want can't amend a moment, can't even stir a pebble.
I got a job writing for a financial technology newsletter in Manhattan. I didn't even understand what I was writing about. The newsletter had, like, 2,000 subscribers, and it was $700 a year for a subscription.
What makes writing a memoir difficult is harder to quantify. Is it learning to know when you're ready to talk about something? Is it seeing the structure in a lumpen mass of fact? Is it finding out what you were really like as other people saw you? Yes to each.
In each scene, the writer sets up a situation, which brings a conflict as well as either a small victory or a loss at the close of that particular scene.
Usually, as a fiction writer, you get e-mails saying, 'I liked your book,' or 'I didn't like it.' You don't get something saying, 'I'm really glad this is in the world.'
A tragedy's first act is crowded with supporting players, policeman scribbling in pads and making radio calls, witnesses crimping their faces, EMS guys folding equipment.
Like all writing rules, the injunction to start with the trouble can be broken, and it should be sometimes - if there's good reason.
You can work really hard and well on something, and someone you respect might hate it; worse, they're not empirically wrong for doing so. This is scary, especially for people who haven't been published.
Often it's the people who know a place least well who write about it best because they see it fresh.
One of the disconcerting things about writing for publication is that you're trying to clear your little parcel of land in a field where Taste is king - and, as we all know, there's no accounting for Taste.
What's Denver's feel? I know there're mountains, and people in western hats, but I never got a good sense of the city.
My wife and I live in Brooklyn, N.Y., not too far from where my Long Island childhood happened.
A subplot is a distinguishing characteristic of the novel; the short story, for example, does not need subplots.
