Weakness, like not being able to bury the past. Weakness, like not giving up hope when you know you should.
I prefer true over happy now.
Genres are just bottles for the various boats. The boats matter to me.
She let him go once. Every day demands that she release him over and over again.
Writers aren’t born properly labeled so it is hard to know one when one appears.
No matter what losses happen in a given season, the Red Sox always have next year.
I didn’t start writing so that I could more deeply know myself. I was bored of myself, my life, my childhood, my hometown. I started writing as a way to know others, to get away from myself.
The basic rule of storytelling is ’show, don’t tell.
Writing across genres has made me more prolific. When one is fighting me or simply not cutting it, I turn to another.
While I was in college becoming a good Catholic I was also becoming a writer – one haunted by Catholicism.
Writing is my obsession, my passion. My relationship with it is one of the most complex and agonizing and richly vexing that I have in my life.
Each genre has something to teach me about the others. Not all the lessons are transferable, but many of the most important ones are.
I don’t have a favorite. I need different genres at different times.
My work is to know the characters intimately and to tell their story.
I have faith in human beings. I struggle with that faith.
One of the reasons I write in different genres is that I get to have the feeling – even fleetingly – that I’m not just writing like Baggott again. I can escape myself.
Different genres allow me to not feel so hemmed in by my own voice, tics, style.
I don’t know when I’m writing dark. I don’t know when I’m writing funny or even heartbreaking. I’m always just trying to write it true.
You want the greatest trick for writing a novel? Here it is: imagine urgently whispering your story into one person’s ear – and only one. This one visualization will clarify every word choice you make.
My childhood was marked by the great fear of nuclear holocaust. We practiced our Civil Defense Drills, lining up in hallways, curled to the floor, but we knew we’d die or, worse, survive only to suffer radiation and slow death.