“I had been pushing my character, and maybe even my sister, into an ‘other’ box, inadvertently dehumanizing her experience, when what I needed to do instead was bring her into my own head more completely and fold our experiences together.”
“Along the way, listening to writers at my dinner table speak of their work, their contracts, their advances, their sales, their ratings on Amazon, their competitors, etc, I came to realize how much it takes to carve out a career as an author, to live by the pen. At my present age, none of these concerns are mine.” Elena Delbacno discusses the perks of publishing later in life.
“In The Universe of Click it’s more important to have someone saying ‘I loved it!’ than ‘The notion intrigued me, but I was unmoved by the pleonastic ramblings on page 94.’ A review is somehow less decisive than the perception that someone has liked something and passed it on to friends and acquaintances on Limped-In, Face-Schmuck, Mumbler, and Fritter…”
Chris Cander talks shop about her creative process and the story origins of her latest novel.
Stephen Policoff discusses the story origins of his latest novel.
“What happened is an anecdote. What someone felt about what happened is a story.”
The whole reason I started writing about this character Stet Looper came through an odd alignment of blunders.
So many stories I come across may bang around in my head—at best—for a few minutes after I’ve finished them. But I can sit here and recall “A Small Good Thing” in such detail—emotional detail—without even a glance at the text. That’s a well-told story, I’d say.
Some of the most complex and weighty signifiers are brand names, celebrity names, clichés, and propagandist phrases like “axis of evil.” These categories overlap: celebrity names are brand names, brand names are propaganda, propaganda is cliché, etc. “Axis of evil” is a place to start because of its obviousness. No educated person I have met can vocalize this phrase without quotation marks implicit in the vocal texture. What do these quotation marks mean? I think they mean we don’t wish anyone to think we are complicit with the ideology behind the phrase. We use quotation marks to indicate awareness of […]
A writer can never have too much (or too little) advice on how to handle rejection. Every rejection, no matter how discrete, invokes the sensation of being punched in the face, and it’s extremely difficult to be magnanimous while that’s going on. So here’s my advice: with a slight shift in perspective, it’s possible to find rejection thrilling. The first step is learning how to take a punch. (Having been raised in a boxing family, I acquired this knowledge early in life.) The second step is learning how to enjoy taking a punch. That’s the hard part. Once my debut […]
