fwriction

Get up every day and do the thing. Don’t rush. Every word you write is necessary, regardless of which ones end up in print.

You don’t have to look that far to find horror. And your job as a writer, no matter how uncomfortable, is to occasionally but responsibly shine a lamp lit with blood into those dark corner of human existence.

Major successes occur mostly in obscurity (appreciated, if you’re lucky, by your family, and the writer-friends you’ve made, who understand). But, in general, ‘success’ only means that you get up every day and do an unseen thing. It takes a long time to finish a novel and a long time to find a home for it. Someone might glance at those solitary years of work and wonder why in the hell you’d want to do that. I can take pride in that, and hope that I’ve made a thing that will be useful to someone somewhere.

We were living together, in the house I grew up in, had it to myself by then. Some friend told us to go for walks after we fought, to try that. So on an evening we’re walking, cooling down, something already wrong between us—I see that now—and we pass the cathedral and she pulls the door open and in we go, don’t know why. Dim, quiet. Shadow clouded the ceiling, vague forms, murals I can’t recall with any sharp lines. We sat in silence. We were small and smothered under impenetrable mystery. That’s how I felt, at least. Goddamn, though, because she took my hand on the way home. Held it and smiled at me when she did it. I remember that now, too, but not how I screwed it up later on.

Buildings, businesses, whole communities sprang up seemingly overnight, then were torn down to make way for their successors, as if living out some myth of endless progress, of clear title to reshape the world day to day.

…the writer’s ultimate concentration should be on the blanket, not on what’s underneath it. What writing can do uniquely, I think, is show us fundamental human tendencies, and the ways these tendencies lead to suffering…

Literature’s job is not to protect young people from the ugly world; it is to arm them with a language to describe difficult truths they already know.

Fiction is not just a genre: It’s a way of inhabiting. It’s an attempt to wrestle away language from the traditional bastions of power from writer to writer, book to book, and have it transform us. It’s a way of understanding our world.