23rd June 2016 | for Creatives | writing, Antonya Nelson, solitude of creating |
"The longer I write the more aware I am of the privacy of the endeavor."
"I spent a lot of time worrying that I wasn't being a writer in the correct way. I don't write every day—I write when I'm burning with an idea. I don't really want to write novels—I prefer stories. These are temperamental issues."
"Dubus frowns on writers' groups, believing they lead members astray from the work at hand. His father told him that a novelist is like a whale submerged in the ocean. You're down there alone, and you're supposed to be down there alone. 'It makes us face our own mortality,' he says. 'Working alone on a 300-to-400-page project for five years all by yourself brings you right to the starkness of coming into the world alone and leaving alone, as we all do.'"
"It's like it's all inside me just kind of trying to get out. If I talk about it, it diffuses it, lets it out, and then maybe it wouldn't be as clear to me, or the characters wouldn't jump out of the page. The dialogue wouldn't just jump out if I talked about it with people and they said, 'Oh yeah, that part's good, that part's...' It's better for me to just keep it all bottled up and let the pressure build."
"You've got to protect your voice and your vision from everybody, really. Even the best-intentioned editors. And I mean, I love my editor; I've been with Vicky Wilson for over 35 years. She's wonderful, and her remarks on the finished manuscript are always terrific. But I don't go to her to discuss a germinating idea."
"I've adjusted my thinking to imagine myself as an artist. I don't know why that made such a huge difference, but it did. An artist in a studio, working. Not the author of the book in the store, but the person in her house, pursuing a thought or character or image and trying to wring something meaningful from it."
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