Learning to write better fiction is a process, not something you either can or can’t do.
As always, I just kind of slither around, investigating the murk in between.
I try to write things that are very readable. Anytime someone tells me they’ve stayed up all night and read my book, I feel like I’ve triumphed.
Perhaps it is more correct to say that the truth of one’s self, not one’s condition, is related to the truth of one’s writing.
Literature is the space of contradiction and ambiguity, and that’s what interests me.
Our time is always apocalyptic, and we are each responsible for the apocalypse. The literary task lies in marking this ‘end of times’ in our work.
These are the basic principles of organizing: you have to have a goal that’s winnable, do-able and reasonable, and you have to have a way of winning it. You can’t repeat strategies that don’t work.
Essays are all about being somewhere else. Not only in space, but somewhere else in time, as well — of having another identity, another persona.
God is often not very dramatic — try sitting through a hundred sermons — but the interiority of considering God, and family, and faith — can be.
Reading theory, like reading poetry, is exhilarating.