“When you see a cable network idiotically perseverating on a story, even when there’s nothing new to report, it’s because they know that making a story a “monster” is all about narrative momentum. And Hearst absolutely was the one who figured out how to make monsters.”
I had a dream where I was visiting my mother in Connecticut and she said, “Stay the night, stay the night.” …. I realized that this was my impulse when she was sick, to stay the night. In other words, to stave off the night.
“Just ‘writer’ suits me fine. It’s not my fault if people come to my novels with such clichéd and parochial expectations of what a novel should be and do — how it should behave — that they find mine failing at something they never even aspired to.”
I believe my best work is compelled to appear by a combination of rigor and deliberate passage. By deliberate passage, I mean writing the right thing the first time. Your life should present you with the words you need. The writing process (for me) is not loose or messy. It must be sharp and clear.
People take from fiction the same comfort and soothing feeling of being understood that, I think, also powers a lot of con and forgery. One reason you would answer the Nigerian email is that you want the money. The other reason is because, wow, this is a story I could be a part of: I helped this poor widow of the assassinated oil minister.
We need novels forged in the black fire of despair – personal despair, political despair, even cosmic despair. Novels shot through with a sense that the end is nigh, that all our efforts are in vain, but that we might at least laugh at our predicament. Laugh – but with a laughter as black as the forces that we laugh at.
Yes, a mac and cheese can be very soothing and delicious, but is it true comfort?
One lesson wish I could send back in time to myself, and particularly a lesson for young male writers, is the idea that writing about tough things make you tough. But almost by definition, if you are writing books, you were not a tough kid. But in the writing world it’s not tough to be the tough kid.
Who knows why some characters stick around while others just pass through? The same question could be asked about most relationships, I guess. The only real difference is that, for writers, some relationships exist in the real world, and others exist in your head.
What could all that suffering possibly be good for? What if it was beautiful and that’s what it was good for? What if, in fact, our pain was the most beautiful thing about us? What if, moreover, our pain was what made us beautiful to God? What would that say about the world and our place in it?