I think people feel for a long time that they ought to know how to write a novel in two drafts.
It's a scary thing for fiction writers, when you're always writing from the point of view both as and for someone who is different.
I've been astonished how often, when I convince a writer to tell a story more straightforwardly and to tell it more simply and directly, it turns out that this author is great and the story is wonderful.
If you have a character stand up and put on her shoes and open the door, in order to do that, you're imagining her shoes and her clothes and her house and her door. The character becomes more real. But once you've done that, you can probably just get it all across with a couple of details.
We're always inventing, even if we're making someone who's fairly close to ourselves.
I think we need to develop the courage to write from the viewpoint of people who may seem quite different from ourselves, who might have a different sexual orientation or a different race or a different ethnicity.
I think the difference between writing as someone and writing for them is that when you write for someone, you take on a kind of political burden or message, which I don't think we have the right to do.
I don't think a white person can write accurately and convincingly about what black people experience of oppression.
Anyone with an imagination can write about the day-to-day experiences of someone he or she is not.
Sometimes indirect style and varying chronology is great, but quite often I've seen it be just something that gets in the way. It turns out when I talk to the writer that she or he, and more often it's a woman, that she's worried.
I began to see, again and again, stories that were first confusing and second where the emotional impact was muted because the big scene came before the explanation of what was going on. There was a reverse chronological order as well as a concealment of what exactly was going on. I think often that comes out of the fear of being boring, and sometimes I think it's just an attempt to seem clever.
Telling someone to be confident in the abstract is not going to make it easier for the unconfident writer to actually get herself or himself to the point of being able to put in the upsetting stuff.
Sometimes I write well when I'm very upset.
I think a day in your life on which nothing bad happens may be a wonderful day, but it probably isn't going to be the basis of a story.
We have to give our poor, innocent, and undeserving-of-our-badness characters trouble in order to make them characters in a story.
When an editor first explained to me the difference between direct and indirect writing, I just thought it was a stylistic choice.
Maybe we're stuck with who we are.
Being part of a community of writers is huge. I really think that's why people go to MFA programs.
This is true in other fields, too, that a legal aid lawyer gets a whole lot less money than a Hollywood lawyer who handles the estates of celebrities. Maybe the legal aid lawyer is doing something better, though, and maybe they're happier. It's not a completely unheard of idea, but I do think we have to remind ourselves at times to look for satisfaction in other ways.
Truly things are better in general now, in America, than in the past.
Writers sometimes are paid a great deal of money, but much more frequently they're not paid or are paid only a little bit.
Inevitably we start by thinking that if our work is any good, we'll get money. It's as we would if you started up a business or if you work in another profession.
It's hard to say which of us is luckier, the ones who go through long periods when they can't write or the ones who can write pretty easily.
I don't have the courage not to write all the time.
Certainly children are being encouraged far more than they were seventy-five years ago and are more accepted as they are.
