Hughes' debut novel, At Dawn, follows a former All-American wrestler, and is there any better metaphor for contemporary American life? We're all wrestling, tussling with the economy, no jobs, doing the best we can. Hughes doesn't flinch from the tough existential questions. He embraces them.
It's a beautiful aspect of narrative construction, hunting for the right images and metaphors to render our character's hearts/minds/souls as though they're ecosystems, full-fledged settings for a reader to inhabit like a place.
Yes, things happened to me - brutal things - but I'm not going to give them so much clout by dwelling on them, empowering them to haunt my heart years after the events transpired. And no good comes from that. These ghosts don't need us to help them stay alive. If we're after real deal healing, these ghosts must desiccate.
No matter what we've done, no matter the disappointments and sullied blunders, today is the opportunity to do right by ourselves.
I don't think escaping is necessarily a problem, but we can get addicted to almost anything. If you're craving being in this other reality and you don't want to participate in your own reality, those are the times we have to start asking ourselves difficult questions.
I'm a semi-failed writer, but I'm a capital-F Failed musician.
I always feel that as the author, once I know what a character is ashamed of, then I can go about making her truthful on the page.
I just thought it was important that people knew right from the jump that I've got problems. But in all seriousness, that's a huge part of my writing process.
We have today and hopefully tomorrow to be the best version of ourselves.
Self-respect doesn't come naturally to me. I need to constantly remind myself and do the work to err on the side of self-respect, rather than self-punishment.
They say you have to get and stay sober for yourself, and of course I agree with that, but I've really appreciated the added stakes of having someone relying on me for survival. My daughter makes me want to do right. That doesn't mean I won't relapse again. It's happened to me before. But she adds a layer of love in my life that I've never known.
I'm always working on something. Addiction never gets any credit, always talked about as a total liability, and I'll admit that most of its traits aren't positive in our lives. But there's one amazing thing it gave me: a tireless work ethic.
It takes a lot of time to be a good junkie or alcoholic - you spend hours getting the necessary supplies, then imbibing, then recovering, rinse and repeat. That's like eighteen hours of a day. And assuming you get out of that lifestyle before it macerates your heart, you have that Junkie Tunnel Vision, except now you get to use it for something positive: you know how to work tirelessly for one thing. Instead of using that tunnel vision to get high, I use it to make art.
My tunnel vision allows me to have a longer work day than most writers. I'm thankful for that.
Memoir is a unique opportunity to revisit yourself. I don't mean by memory. I mean in the revision process. You don't just write a chapter and that's it. You must constantly return to it. You must dote on it. And even if it's saying something ugly about who you are, you have to find the poetry in it. You have to find the poetry in yourself.
Shamefulness is always a huge part of my characterizations. I like protagonists that reveal, either through "honesty" in their various thought processes or via their actions, perhaps telling us things they're not so keen on disclosing through their interactions with the outside world. Probably both during the duration of a novel.
I struggle with staying clean every day, and what really keeps me from doing something stupid is my daughter.
I used to consider myself to be a cineophile, and then I had a daughter. Ha! Now I barely see any movies.
The point of reading is to inhabit a consciousness that doesn't belong to the reader, immersing yourself in a life that's wholly realized. And a huge facet of our psychic and existential make-ups is the things we're not proud of, things we didn't ask to experience, the scenarios we flubbed.
If a character is honest with a reader, then (hopefully) that will engage the reader's empathy centers; she'll meet that openness with acceptance, and they'll forge a nourishing and meaningful bond as the book continues.
My job as the novelist is to present the whole case, then the reader gets to render her verdict.
It's important to write like your readers are brilliant.
In my life the right question is simply this: What can I do to be happy today?
Today is going to be free of the past. Today, the past can't hurt me.
I want to be the kind of adult that keeps learning. I want to always be open to new experiences.
