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Ayana Mathis Quotes about Writing

All Ayana Mathis Quotes Character Country Writing quotes
I think that if you just write your characters you end up with something that people can access.

I think that if you just write your characters you end up with something that people can access.

Ayana Mathis
Writing, Character, Thinking
Source: www.pbs.org

Even if you don't feel like sitting down to write or working on that big proposal, or whatever it is, just show up anyhow and the rest will follow.

Ayana Mathis
Writing, Sitting Down, Proposal
"Twelve Tribes of Hattie Author Ayana Mathis Talks Fiction, Family, and (Sometimes) Faking It". Interview with Meredith Turits, www.glamour.com. December 17, 2012.

You have to find a way of shutting the future out and focusing on the writing. One of the problems I'll have with writing my second book is getting back into a situation where I think about the words on the page rather than the publishing industry, or success, or any kind of readership I may now have. I'll have to do what writers do, which is focus on the story and nothing else.

Ayana Mathis
Book, Writing, Thinking
Source: www.guernicamag.com

Fiction writing is an act of imagination, lived experience is secondary in many ways, writing a novel really is all about inventing worlds and people.

Ayana Mathis
Writing, People, Imagination
"Twelve Tribes of Hattie Author Ayana Mathis Talks Fiction, Family, and (Sometimes) Faking It". Interview with Meredith Turits, www.glamour.com. December 17, 2012.

I've been writing all my life. Even though I didn't have sort of careerist aspirations as a writer, it was very much my identity.

Ayana Mathis
Writing, Identity, Aspiration
Source: www.pbs.org

I started writing the book without realizing I was writing a book. That sounds stupid, but it's true. I'd been trying and failing to make a different manuscript work, and I thought I was just taking a break by writing some short stories. I'm not a very good short story writer - the amazing compression that is required for short stories doesn't come easily to me. But anyway, I thought I'd try to write some short stories. And a structure took shape - I stumbled upon it.

Ayana Mathis
Stupid, Book, Writing
Source: www.guernicamag.com

I think of my success as a kind of fluke. How else could I possibly think of it? And although it's a banal thing to say, I wrote my book because I was writing my book. At first I didn't know I was writing it, and one of the amazing things that happened as I was putting sentences down on paper is that some of the things that are most sacred and important to me rose to the surface of the prose.

Ayana Mathis
Book, Writing, Thinking
Source: www.guernicamag.com

I couldn't imagine a book with many characters in it and one of them not being gay. It would have felt like a glaring and problematic omission for me. But I also wanted to write that character as a person, not just a gay person.

Ayana Mathis
Book, Writing, Character
Source: www.guernicamag.com

I think a lot about race and the burdens of representation. There's an idea that because I'm writing a book set around the time of the Great Migration, and happen to be black, I'm trying to write a definitive account of the Great Migration, the so-called "black experience." That's not what I'm doing, and it can be frustrating.

Ayana Mathis
Book, Writing, Thinking
Source: www.guernicamag.com

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