Alice Mattison Quotes
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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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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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Every once in a while someone says, 'You can't really learn anything, if you're really a writer then you wouldn't need to do it.' But I think what people need is the sense of not being alone. They go to MFA programs to be part of a community of people who care, and then you start caring about your friend who is trying to edit a magazine and your other friend who is stuck in the middle of her poem. There you have all kinds of things to worry about besides your own success.
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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 think people feel for a long time that they ought to know how to write a novel in two drafts.
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When an editor first explained to me the difference between direct and indirect writing, I just thought it was a stylistic choice.
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Sometimes I write well when I'm very upset.
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I think that inevitably, the trouble our characters go through is a kind of metaphor for what's happening in ourselves.
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I don't really like to tell people to get out drugs.
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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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Inevitably we start by thinking that if our work is any good, we'll get money. It's as we would if you started up a business or if you work in another profession.
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There's the belief that we can't be smart enough to write. And certainly censorship of women, too.
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Teaching is very important to me, and it has become more important as I get older.
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You may be somebody who writes best for a small press that doesn't pay very well, but you might have a fascinating and intricate style that might not appeal to as many readers but will be incredibly meaningful to the readers you have. Truly, that's as wonderful if not more wonderful.
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Being part of a community of writers is huge. I really think that's why people go to MFA programs.
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The making of fiction takes literally what is suggested by our imagination.
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There are so many different ways, most of them helpful and legal, to get yourself into a state of mind where writing is possible. It's going to be different for each person.
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I just like doing it, I like writing.
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I love it when people can help me with my work, so I do show it.
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I've been astonished how often, when I convince a writer to tell a story more straightforwardly and to tell it more simply and directly, it turns out that this author is great and the story is wonderful.
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Truly things are better in general now, in America, than in the past.
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It's hard to say which of us is luckier, the ones who go through long periods when they can't write or the ones who can write pretty easily.
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I think you have to remember that writing is hard; my first editor used to say that to me.
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Whoever would write books? It's suffering as well as greatly satisfying. And certainly there's suffering in the sense that you don't know for a long time how to do it.