They must have looked like traveling companions, Phoebe thought, possibly even a couple. She noticed her voice leaning into laughter, how she tossed her head, each tiny gesture like the sweet ache of a muscle craving exercise.
Read at the level at which you want to write. Reading is the nourishment that feeds the kind of writing you want to do.
A sense of that kind of narrative movement that we experience online could have been in my mind easily, though not consciously. I do rely so much on my unconscious, the way I write my stuff the way I do. I let my unconscious work. I have better ideas that way and more interesting work.
The answers were maddeningly absent – it was like trying to remember a song that you knew made you feel a certain way, without a title, artist, or even a few bars to bring it back.
I guess in my own life, privacy, anonymity, and the mystery of being lost are important. I also feel that people are mysterious and complex no matter what they do, and no matter how hard they try to reveal their own mystery.
The sky was electric blue above the trees but the yard felt dark. Stephanie went to the edge of the lawn and sat her forehead on her knees. The grass and soil were still warm from the day. She wanted to cry but she couldn’t. The feeling was too deep.
Everyone we’ve lost, we’ll find. Or they’ll find us.
There’s something very strange about associating me with that prize. I had hoped for it in a more directed way as a journalist. Somehow as a journalist you know there are Pulitzers out there and you can work hard and get one. To win it for Fiction seems unbelievable.
I am at my worst trying to write about things that overlap with my life.
I think ethical ambivalence is a kind of innoculation, a way of excusing yourself in advance for something you actually want to do. No offense.
I haven’t had writer’s block. I think it’s because my process involves writing very badly.
I hope to keep writing journalism as long as I write fiction; it’s afforded me such amazing adventures and opportunities. It does take a lot of time, so it’s hard to do both at once, but I try to do a big journalism piece every couple of years, and I’ll hopefully continue with that.
I felt more doubtful than usual with ‘Goon Squad,’ because I knew that the book’s genre wasn’t easily named – Novel? Stories? Novel-in-stories? – and I worried that its lack of a clear category would count against it. My hopes for it were pretty modest.
Because you can’t write habitually and well all the time, you have to be willing to write badly. That’s how you get the regularity that enables you to be present for the good stuff.
We live in a moment and a culture when reading is really endangered. There’s simply no way to write well, though, if you’re not reading well.
The bottom line is that I like my first drafts to be blind, unconscious, messy efforts; that’s what gets me the best material.
That adage about ‘Write what you know’ is basically the opposite of the way I function. I write about what I’m curious to find out.
If you don’t have people that the reader cares about and stories that are gripping, you’ve got nothing.
I’m a dogged person. I respond to adversity with a steely resistance.
I don’t really know where my ideas come from. I start with a time and a place. That’s what I need to get started, and an intellectual question.