Our culture has a very specific and somewhat rigid preconception of what a Wall Street trader looks like, and I wanted to write a character who challenged that preconception.
So a good way to make myself write an essay is to nurture and cultivate a small obsession. Like a Chia Pet.
How could the alpaca consciousness not be affected by all this?
We’re all in over our heads – like residents of the underworld, dimly aware of another world above – but we’re also blissfully (or willfully) oblivious to so many perils around us, because that obliviousness allows us to keep moving, like Wile E. Coyote, even when there’s no longer any solid ground underfoot.
When all of the prescribed actions are over, now how do you behave? There is no prescription for two weeks after the funeral, or five weeks after the funeral.
“Things that have happened are tangibly still happening, whether we know it, accept it, or not.”
Excellent fiction is not another escape or distraction from the truth but it shines light on it and it allows the reader to wrangle it. This is fiction’s invaluable importance.
“The patterns are the problem, right? In literature you can disrupt the patterns, and offer new ones.”
“The problem with being coherent is that then you can be marketed to.”
I don’t worry whether or not my writing is innovative or experimental. I only want to be on that bookshelf, the one that’s off limits, that requires special permission to access, that has to be found and sought after from a queer distance.