We all get taught how to construct a paragraph, and how to use the digital editing system, and how to do HTML code for Wordpress, and nobody ever talks to us about what’s actually the engine behind the whole thing — which is, well: where are you going to get an idea?
Newfoundland is a pretty remote, tiny place. It’s so small that it’s amazing it makes any impact on the rest of the world at all.
We love metaphors because they give us the feeling that the world is unified or connected, that there is an underlying relationship between all things that we sense but can’t always name or describe.
When I was a kid, opening a sci-fi or fantasy book with a map inside front cover was always thrilling — to look at this imaginary landscape. And it’s still thrilling. I’m still a sucker for books where the first thing you see is a map…because of this feeling that you’re going into another world.
In a way, I write about sports so I can write about writers without, well, writing about writers which is, in most instances, pretty boring.
“I wouldn’t say that I was setting out to try to write ‘metafiction’ or ‘postmodern’ fiction – although I can’t deny that that’s probably what I wrote. For a long time, I thought that I was writing an impossible book, that the book just wasn’t going to pan out.”
“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.