Alice Mattison Quotes
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When I've taught writing to five, six, and seven year olds, it's not very different than talking to an adult writer. They're writers then, and when they get to be young teenagers they're not anymore. You might go and talk to them about writing, and they'll be very self-conscious or will have detached themselves from the group.
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Little children are all writers.
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I get to a certain point, and I think in a novel it's about the third draft, when I want other eyes on it.
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We still have so many cultures in which people are imprisoned and whipped and killed for writing what they think.
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I love to read nonfiction and memoir, but I'm mostly interested in the piece of writing more than the person.
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This is true in other fields, too, that a legal aid lawyer gets a whole lot less money than a Hollywood lawyer who handles the estates of celebrities. Maybe the legal aid lawyer is doing something better, though, and maybe they're happier. It's not a completely unheard of idea, but I do think we have to remind ourselves at times to look for satisfaction in other ways.
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I had never written about what it's like to live the life of a writer, and I had never read a book that combined talking about the life of writing and how you can do it, how you can stand it, how you can emotionally manage it, with the choices that we all make on the page.
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I find that I get very excited about what my students are up to and that I get to be the hurdle they need to jump over.
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We have to give our poor, innocent, and undeserving-of-our-badness characters trouble in order to make them characters in a story.
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Certainly children are being encouraged far more than they were seventy-five years ago and are more accepted as they are.
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If you have a character stand up and put on her shoes and open the door, in order to do that, you're imagining her shoes and her clothes and her house and her door. The character becomes more real. But once you've done that, you can probably just get it all across with a couple of details.
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Sometimes indirect style and varying chronology is great, but quite often I've seen it be just something that gets in the way. It turns out when I talk to the writer that she or he, and more often it's a woman, that she's worried.
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I heard a white writer say, 'Oh, I'd never put black people in my writing, I'm afraid I would offend someone by doing it wrong.' I can't bear that!
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You can't tell a writer they should just be more confident.
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I think a day in your life on which nothing bad happens may be a wonderful day, but it probably isn't going to be the basis of a story.
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Maybe we're stuck with who we are.
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In many cultures, women are sometimes literally kept from learning to read or from going to school.
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Somehow we have to detach from feeling as though money is a quick and easy standard by which we can gauge how well we're doing.
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You have to write fiction that mirrors the actual world, which has people of all sorts in it.
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I'm very secretive. I'll write a whole novel and revise it, which might take me two years or more, and the people I know best don't know what I'm writing about.
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I began to see, again and again, stories that were first confusing and second where the emotional impact was muted because the big scene came before the explanation of what was going on. There was a reverse chronological order as well as a concealment of what exactly was going on. I think often that comes out of the fear of being boring, and sometimes I think it's just an attempt to seem clever.
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There seems to be a tremendous desire among many people now to know authors and how they work, to know what's autobiographical and what isn't.
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We have to diversify, we have to find work we can do that helps other people while helping ourselves, work that has to do with writing that isn't necessarily just writing saleable novels or getting huge advances.
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The main thing is to explain to yourself that everybody suffers.