Viet Thanh Nguyen

"The practice of writing is a kind of self-instruction that no number of writing workshops can teach you.  You have to learn how to do it yourself.  The writing makes you a writer, it builds your discipline, enhances your talent, and draws froth the reserves of your character."

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

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"Plan for the long haul.  If you're extremely talented and lucky, you'll be famous in a few years.  Most of us, including me, are neither that talented nor lucky."

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

for Creatives  |  the successful artist, writing, KEEP CREATING, the creative life, Viet Thanh Nguyen

"I don't care about quotation marks and directing the reader and making things easy for the reader.  I don't want my fiction to be an example of the MFA style of 'show, don't tell,' of giving the reader a window onto reality, of lending a sense of transparency to the prose.  Stylistically, I wanted something dense, image-heavy, and digressive, because I like those things."

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

for Creatives  |  create for YOURSELF, artist integrity, writing, writer-reader relationship, artist's voice, artist's message, punctuation, creative freedom, Viet Thanh Nguyen, break the rules

"I like high modernism and low genre.  I'm bored by middlebrow literary realism, which seems to be the dominant mode of contemporary American fiction."

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

for Creatives  |  literary fiction, writing, genre, American, Viet Thanh Nguyen

"It took me 20 years of writing before I could write [Pulitzer Prize-winning] The Sympathizer.  I got to that point by writing a lot, reading a lot, and enduring a lot."

— Viet Thanh Nguyen

for Creatives  |  creative process, awards, writing, KEEP CREATING, artists must EXPERIENCE, Viet Thanh Nguyen

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