America, to me, should be shouting all the time, a bunch of shouting voices, most of them wrong, some of them nuts, but please, not just one droning glamourous reasonable voice.
Success makes opportunities and so many of those “opportunities” are actually exemptions – from hardship, from unfriendliness, from struggle.
For me, the fiction writer’s job is to take the small, stupid process of learning to use an iPhone – and suddenly you’re the guy who’s asking your daughter, “When I go on Facebook, can it see me?”
Whatever your supposed politics are – left, right – if you put it in a human connection, most people will rise to the occasion and feel the human pain in a way that they might not if it was presented in a more conceptual way.
When something really bad is going on in a culture, the average guy doesn’t see it. He can’t. He’s average and is surrounded by and immersed in the cant and discourse of the status quo.
She said America was a spoiled child ignorant of grief.
I am always considering the reader. Although this is admittedly kind of odd: Which reader? On what day? In what mood? For me, that “reader” is actually just me, if I had never read the story before.
I’ve had the thought that a person’s ‘artistic vision’ is really just the cumulative combination of whatever particular stances he has sincerely occupied during his creative life – even if some of those might appear contradictory.
If you think of a work of fiction as a kind of scale model of the world, then the positive valences – where things turn out better than you thought they would – ought to be in there somewhere, too.
I’ve seen time and time again the way that the process of trying to say something dignifies and improves a person.
When I’m explaining something to you, if I’m being long-winded, and twisty in a non-productive way, I could make you feel vaguely insulted. And you’d have a right to be.
As a writer I’m essentially just trying to impersonate a first-time reader, who picks up the story and has to decide, at every point, whether to keep going.
The one thing fiction and non-fiction writing have in common for me is that sense of trying to get the sentences to be minimal but at the same time be a little overfull – to encourage them to do a kind of poetic work.
What a powerful thing to know: That one’s own desires are mappable onto strangers; that what one finds in oneself will most certainly be found in The Other.
When I was a kid, I took ‘The Brady Bunch’ and ‘The Partridge Family’ very seriously. It was a world to me in the same way that the Greek myths would have been had I read them. You know, Marcia is Athena and Mr. Brady is Zeus.
I think that’s one of the maybe under-discussed aspects of process – the difference between a good writing day and a bad one is the quality of the split-second decisions you made.
If you at least try to do the things that excite you, it will make you a more expansive and present person – you’ll feel, at the end of your life, that at least you took the shot.
I’m very happy – if I can do even a little bit of work to get the short story out more, I’m thrilled.
My heartfelt wish for you: as you get older, your self will diminish and you will grow in love.
Stay alert. The big moral crossroads in your life may not come labeled as such.