![]() ![]() Doctorow: “Writing a novel is like driving at night. So you can dream by being curious-by being curious enough to report back what’s in front of your narrative eye. And if you have that, talent makes no difference, whether you’ve got it or not.” I know the exact quote by heart: “Insight, curiosity, to wonder, to mull and to muse why it is that man what does what he does. Late in his life, Faulkner was asked what quality a writer most needs-and he said not talent, but curiosity. These are all part of your toolbox-but that toolbox will always remain locked if the writer is not genuinely curious about what he or she is writing about. All these things we can be taught, or learn on our own from reading. To bring in at least three of the five senses to activate a scene. We can learn to use active verbs instead of passive verbs. We can to choose concrete language over overly abstract language. But what does it fucking mean, “dream with language?” I think this is what happens. OK, I know: It’s one thing to quote Bausch. But that’s when the work starts to have a beating heart. Things start to happen under your pencil that you don’t want to happen, or don’t understand. What happens then is, you start writing something you don’t even really want to write about. So I’ve learned over the years to free-fall into what’s happening. And all these years later, that’s the thrill I write to get: to feel things start to happen on their own. If you allow them to do what they’re going to do, think and feel what they’re going to think and feel, things start to happen on their own. It was exciting, and even a little terrifying. It’s writing from the outside in instead of the inside out.īut during my very early writing, certainly before I’d published, I began to learn characters will come alive if you back the fuck off. I’ve learned, for me at least, it’s a dead road. ![]() I was writing stories hoping they would say something thematic, or address something that I was wrestling with philosophically. When I began to write, I was deeply self-conscious. This was my main problem when I was just starting out: I was trying to say something. You can hear the false note in this kind of writing. I think it leads to contrived work, frankly, no matter how beautifully written it might be. You think, “I need this to happen so some other thing can happen.” There’s an aspect of controlling the material that I don’t think is artful. You’re making something up when you think out a scene, when you’re being logical about it. There’s a profound difference between making something up and imagining it. I began to learn characters will come alive if you back the fuck off. As a writing teacher, if I say nothing else to my students, it’s this. I think the desire to step into someone else’s dream world, is a universal impulse that’s shared by us all. And I really believe-this is just from years of daily writing-that good fiction comes from the same place as our dreams. But the one that’s stayed with me over the years, from Richard Bausch, has become a sort of mantra for me: There were a lot of heavy hitters in there offering truly wise and helpful advice. He talked to me by phone from his house north of Boston.Īndre Dubus III: Years ago, I read a book called Letters to a Fiction Writer, which asked about 20 established writers to send their best advice out into the world. ![]() Dubus is the author of books including The House of Sand and Fog (a finalist for the National Book Award), The Garden of Last Days, and Townie. In the first story, a cuckolded man stalks his wife with a video camera in the last, a young woman’s world is shattered when a sexually explicit image of her surfaces online. We discussed what it means to write into the unknown, how to do it, and why writers should.ĭirty Love contains four linked novellas about love and betrayal in a coastal town. What do novelists mean when they say things like my character showed me the way? But my conversation with Andre Dubus III, whose new book Dirty Love is out this week, addressed the challenges and joys of writing without pre-determination. The latter approach can sound odd, even shamanistic. ![]()
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