Darin Strauss Quotes
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I suppose that, for most of us, the fascination of conjoined twins is that such people can serve as symbols.
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I think it's a wonderful fact about Judaism - at least about the approach to Judaism I most relate to: There are no universal answers. We don't have it all figured out. God is unknowable.
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For the fiction students I teach, one of the most common mistakes is to start in the wrong place. Often the actual story doesn't begin until about a third of the way into their narratives. They start off instead with excessive scene-setting, metaphysical speculation, introducing nonessential dramatis personae, throat-clearing, etc.
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Like all writing rules, the injunction to start with the trouble can be broken, and it should be sometimes - if there's good reason.
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Perhaps it's because a writer lives in Brooklyn that he'd want to get away from it. It can be very sustaining, this community of writers - sometimes it's the feeling of many hands giving you a boost. But all that identical ambition can be choking, too. The many hands slide up to your throat.
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My knowledge of trains - and love before first sight, love at negative-one sight - comes from Alfred Hitchcock.
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Characters stretching their legs in some calm haven generally don't make for interesting protagonists.
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You can work really hard and well on something, and someone you respect might hate it; worse, they're not empirically wrong for doing so. This is scary, especially for people who haven't been published.
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After a life deprived of everything from romantic love to the choice of when to wake up in the morning, after 29 years without the ability to have a career or even to be alone at toilet, the Bijani sisters are not symbols but women who have had to live a shared life of constant, quotidian sacrifice.
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What makes writing a memoir difficult is harder to quantify. Is it learning to know when you're ready to talk about something? Is it seeing the structure in a lumpen mass of fact? Is it finding out what you were really like as other people saw you? Yes to each.
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My training and my inclination is to invent.
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Too much contemporary fiction seems purposefully to address small things in small ways. And yet why not try for the all-inclusive, the gripping, for the audacious?
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Write what you think is good, is the whole of the law.
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It's good training for a novelist to try to discern the truth about a place after only a few glimpses of it.
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My prayer is improvised - though like some standard jazz performance, the improv happens within pretty strict parameters - and asks for nothing.
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I'm really wary of self-help books.
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Conjoined twins are identical siblings who develop one placenta out of a single fertilised ovum. No cases of conjoined triplets or quadruplets have been documented.
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One of the disconcerting things about writing for publication is that you're trying to clear your little parcel of land in a field where Taste is king - and, as we all know, there's no accounting for Taste.
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A subplot is a distinguishing characteristic of the novel; the short story, for example, does not need subplots.
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Constant rejection. No security. Career paths being dictated by freelance reviewers. And of course, the terror of the writing desk, of the blank page. Why is it so hard for our non-writer friends to understand this - that it's a job?
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Memoirs are - memory is - rarely 100 percent accurate. Any autobiography is a construct, ballpark, even unnatural. Private diaries, too, can be unreliable - a detail that matters only if the diary is read.
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The main thing is to think strategically about what will engage your readers. Trust me when I tell you that few people are eager to read a story whose opening lines sound like a dissertation on giant bugs.
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If you're guilty of something, you can focus on that, but if something terrible happens, and you can't imagine how you could have changed it, that's very difficult for the mind. In some ways, it's more difficult not to be at fault because it's a subtler thing.
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Not to be too 'Tale of Two Cities' about it, but I find writing a memoir easier than writing fiction, and more difficult.