“It may be that you, like many, think that writing fiction does not require study. And not only that: that it is not improved by study. That talent is preeminent, the only thing required to become a writer. I was told I was talented. I don’t know that it did much except make me lazy when I should have worked harder. I know many talented people who never became writers, perhaps because they got lazy when they were told they were talented. Telling writers this may even be a way to take them out of the game. I know untalented people who did become writers, and who write exceptionally well. You can have talent, but if you cannot endure, if you cannot learn to work, and learn to work against your own worst tendencies and prejudices, if you cannot take the criticism of strangers, or the uncertainty, then you will not become a writer. PhD, MFA, self-taught – the only things you must have to become a writer are the stamina to continue and a wily, cagey heart in the face of extremity, failure, and success.”

“

The story of your life, described, will not describe how you came to think about your life or yourself, nor describe any of what you learned. This is what fiction can do – I think it is even what fiction is for. But learning this was still ahead of me.

I knew what I thought was normal for a first novel, but every first novel is the answer to the question of what is normal for a first novel. Mine came to me in pieces at first, as if it were once whole and someone had broken it and scattered it inside me, hiding until it was safe for it to be put back together. In the time before I understood that I was writing this novel, each time a piece of it emerged, I felt as if I’d received a strange valentine from a part of me that had a very different relationship to language than the me that walked around, had coffee with friends, and hoped for the best out of every day. The words felt both old and new, and the things they described were more real to me when I reread them than the things my previous sentences had tried to collect inside them.

And so while I wrote this novel, it didn’t feel like I could say that I chose to write this novel. The writing felt both like an automatic process, as compulsory as breathing or the beat of the heart, and at the same time as if an invisible creature had moved into a corner of my mind and begun building itself, making visible parts out of things dismantled from my memory, summoned from my imagination. I was spelling out a message that would allow me to talk to myself and to others. This novel that emerged was about things I could not speak of in life, in some cases literally. I would lie, or I would feel a weight on my chest as if someone was sitting there. But when the novel was done, I could read from it. A prosthetic voice.

”

“I was with him in a way that I had been with no one else, and from what I understand, this was also true for him. It isn’t just that you fall in love with someone – you each allow yourself new identities with each other, new skins, almost like a cocoon to who you’ll be next. Strange to ourselves and to each other; only the feeling of the room, the silence of it, was familiar.”

“If you are reading this, and you’re a writer, and you, like me, are gripped with despair, when you think you might stop: Speak to your dead. Write for your dead. Tell them a story. What are you doing with this life? Let them hold you accountable. Let them make you bolder or more modest or louder or more loving, whatever it is, but ask them in, listen, and then write. And when war comes – and make no mistake, it is already here – be sure you write for the living, too. The ones you love, and the ones who are coming for your life. What will you give them when they get there? I tell myself I can’t imagine a story that can set them free, these people who hate me, but I am writing precisely because one did that for me. So I always remember that, and I know to write even for them.”

“

I have a theory of the first novel now, that it is something that makes the writer, even as the writer makes the novel. That it must be something you care about enough to see through to the end. I tell my students all the time: writing fiction is an exercise in giving a shit – an exercise in finding out what you really care about. Many student writers become obsessed with aesthetics, but I find that is usually a way to avoid whatever it is that they have to say. My first novel was not the first one I started. It was the first one I finished. Looking at my records, I count three previous unfinished novels; pieces of one of them went into this first one. But the one I finished, I finished because I asked myself a question.

What will you let yourself know? What will you allow yourself to know?

”

“

Women are not going to start claiming too much. Women are just getting closer to claiming something closer to their share. What looks like overreach is simply reach.

Any time that a woman acts in her own interest or in the interest of her gender, she is accused of selfishness. Look, even, at the language of “having it all,” which is my most loathed phrase for a million reasons, namely that it’s a cliché. But it’s a perfect example of what we’re talking about here. “Having it all” has been the default state of male life.

But when women make any kind of move towards having a full life that has many dimensions in many different directions, it gets framed as an issue of greedy acquisition. Every move toward equality for women has always been framed as narcissism, self-interest, vanity, self-regard, piggishness.

”

(Source: jezebel.com)