David Bergen Quotes
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I tend to push whatever is looking over my shoulder away when I am writing. It's once the box of books arrive that I say I'm going to be pilloried for this or that. But then you realize it's done, and there is nothing I can do. I'm proud of the book.
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I may not have written the stories that I've written if I hadn't ended up in Niverville. I don't know; I don't know. How can you know?
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For me, when I 'discover' a story, there is a feeling of buoyancy and clarity, perhaps similar to early morning out on a prairie highway, when darkness lifts and reveals the outline of farmhouses and copses of trees in the distance.
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I gave up writing for seven years (very biblical) and picked it up again, still clueless and still seeking the exotic, when I was twenty-one.
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You are only as good as your last book, and so there has to be a book.
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The story wrote quickly. I called it 'Where You're From,' and I sent it out, as I had numerous other stories over the years. Except this time I got a letter back saying that it would be published. Someone out there had liked the story. I was thirty-one years old.
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It took me ten years to write a proper story. I floundered about trying to shape something, counting on the 'feeling' I had as I wrote, only to discover upon rereading my work that the feeling had disappeared, and what remained was an empty shell.
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The IMPAC is a terribly important award.
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I always have a book that I use that somehow inspires my novels.
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As a writer, you write the book, you give it to your editor, it's copy edited, it's published, it's thrown out there, and then there's a response.
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Books in general are great, but I'm a fiction lover, and I will continue to do it.
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In my brief writing life, it means I am still lucky that I have at least one more novel to complete. I do not expect that a story will arrive just because it is time to write another novel. It doesn't happen that way.
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An editor is an accomplice, looking in from the outside. That objective view is essential. We don't write in a vacuum, and we don't publish in a vacuum.
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I like characters who are contradictory.
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In 1970, at the age of 14, I entered a short story contest offering a grand prize of one dollar. I won. This was my first foray into writing fiction. I loved reading and thought that it shouldn't be so hard to write a story.
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As a writer, I'm always aware of the fact that there are so many books out there.
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Though I loved books as a young boy, I loved sports even more. I wanted to be a quarterback in the CFL.
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What fascinates me as a writer is the stuff underneath, To me, what drives a novel is the curiosity behind the character and the depths that you want to find in that character.
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At the age of twenty, having published nothing and having had little guidance in my reading, I decided that I wanted to write.
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A mentor, a 'teacher,' is like an editor. I absolutely value my editor, who is my teacher.
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I think a construction project for me is like writing a novel. I can't do the project unless I can envision sort of the whole structure and see what the end result might be.
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I was a big reader of Zane Grey as a young boy, and so horses and the West figured large in my imagination.
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That's the novelist's job: to peel back the layers and look underneath.
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When I get moved to write a story, I don't question the story. I dive right in, and I try to ignore the voices that are chattering away at me: 'You can't do that', 'You shouldn't do that'. I just sort of leap and take a chance and go for it.