Jesmyn Ward Quotes
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I've found that in fiction - and this is just the kind of writer I am - I can't really work from an outline. I have a vague idea of the characters at the beginning of the book, and then I have a vague idea of whatever the end of the book will be, but I can't approach creative nonfiction like that.
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I think that being a parent has expanded my writing, expanded my understanding of my characters, and has added a depth and richness to my work. Having kids deepened my idea of parenting and all the anxieties that come along with it.
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Faulkner's characters, too, were uneducated. They were deprived, but they were allowed to have very rich inner lives. I want to advocate for that, for inner lives that are much more complicated and more poetic than we think.
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Writing 'Men We Reaped' broke me in different ways at different spots in the drafting process. The first draft was hard because I was just getting it out. In some ways, that draft failed. I was really just telling the story, not making assessments - this happened, then this. Just putting those facts down on paper was really painful.
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I love creating that community and writing about that place, because I think, in some ways, Bois Sauvage is like the DeLisle of my past; it's like the DeLisle of the '80s that I can never return to. So in some ways, when I write about Bois Sauvage, I'm writing about a home that I've lost.
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Hip-hop, which is my generation's blues, is important to the characters that I write about. They use hip-hop to understand the world through language.
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Throughout my career, when I have been rejected, there was sometimes subtext, and it was this: People will not read your work because these are not universal stories.
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I don't really base any of my characters on specific people that I know, although my characters are informed by the kind of people who live in my community.
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We're all about pulling ourselves up by our bootstraps, et cetera - I think that's a harmful mythology, that the choices that we make and the things that we do in our lives are not connected to anything else. So I'd like to help to debunk that.
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Physical books are still my favorite, but I own an e-book reader. They're convenient for travel.
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I've always used Southern rappers in epigraphs for my novels. For 'Sing, Unburied, Sing,' I wanted to use Big K.R.I.T. - because I have so much respect for the lyrical depth of their music.
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It's impossible for most black Americans to construct full family trees. Official census records, used by so many genealogy enthusiasts to piece together their families' pasts, don't include our non-European ancestors.
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I feel a lot of pressure when I'm writing because I know, you know, if they looked at a synopsis of the book, what they read could only confirm all the stereotypes that they have about us and about people like us.
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As a parent, you want to protect your children, but the fact of racism in this country, of inequality, that is still a lesson my children are going to have to learn. I can't protect my kids from that.
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I think, when I write, one of the things that I'm really attempting to do is I'm attempting to humanize my characters.
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My time in New York really clarified things for me. I thought, 'What could I do with my life that would give it meaning?' And writing was that for me.
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I love where I'm from. I love the landscape because it is so beautiful, and I also love the people of my community, the people whose stories I'm trying to tell.
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It really bothers me when people say we live in a postracial America.
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It's always hard for a writer to make herself into a character; I had to figure out what my defining characteristics were, and that's something I had to work through multiple drafts to figure out.
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I've heard some writers say that they are obsessed with certain ideas and that they find themselves writing around the same obsession again and again, but telling different stories to get at that same idea. I'm beginning to think that I suffer from this syndrome, too.
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That larger story in 'Salvage the Bones' is just about survival, and I think that, in the end, there are things about this novel and about these characters' experiences that make their stories universal stories.
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I hope people who read my books feel empathy for us and really see us as complicated people.
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Confidence definitely did not get me here! More of, like, desperation.
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I couldn't run from that desire to tell stories, that desire to tell stories about us, and about the people I loved.