Quote

As I get ready to buy a new computer, I'm stunned at all the many micro drafts, of different chapters and scenes and whatnot, that litter the hard drive.

Alexander Chee

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Alexander Chee
Age: 57
Born: 1967
Born: August 21
Fiction Writer
Journalist
Poet
Writer
Rhode Island
United States
Scene
Litter
Ready
Micro
Many
Drafts
Hard
Stunned
Different
Chapters
Scenes
Drive
Computer
Whatnot

More quotes by Alexander Chee

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I grew up treating a life as a writer as a career in letters, one devoted to many kinds of writing. And so it seemed normal to study both fiction writing and the literary essay as an undergrad.
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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.
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I realized that my identity as a novelist was private. Only I knew how much of a novelist I was!
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The ideal editor will hold you to the best of yourself in the piece.
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As writer pay declined and teacher pay also, we all started hanging out online. You could say online social networks cheapen our friendships or you could say we were cheapened by a plutocratic power grab and this is all we can afford.
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The secret to being a rider in the hippodrome wasn't that you must be agile, or that you must be good with horses...It was that you must hide inside your costume a little of a killer's heart.
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Every now and then, you find a book that feels like it was keyed to your DNA.
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One of my big inspirations was Céleste Mogador. She was a courtesan who wrote her memoirs in order to pay off her debts, which is a hilarious gesture.
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Most written work is a conversation between the editor and the writer, that the writer essentially fulfills in public, and the editor provides the stage for that to happen as well as the prompts.
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I've been told it's hard to write about singing. I didn't realize that going into it. I might not have tried if I knew!
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It's my experience that people don't think of fiction writing as being as intellectually serious as other kinds of writing in academia and so without a career as a critic or essayist you can be treated as something of a spiritual medium - a fraud - for just writing fiction.
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The idea of a talent that was bigger than an artist's ability to choose to use it, that would dictate the artist's life more than the artist could dictate, was interesting to me.
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Each source that I read, I would look through the bibliography and the footnotes, and use that as a map for the next thing I would read.
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With my family background - my parents were both activists - writing about culture and politics came naturally.
Alexander Chee
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The way some were entrapped into lives of prostitution, the way that something like marriage could rob them of their rights.
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Whenever people say a coincidence in a novel is implausible, I think, Do I have a story for you.
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I was trying to make a novel about something no one wanted to read about into something they couldn't put down or look away from.
Alexander Chee
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I have lived for a long time inside a series of coincidences that most people would find implausible in a novel.
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Writers aren't born, they're made - from practice, reading, and a lot of caffeine.
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I had a naiveté that I would remember the things that I had written already, but I was getting lost in the forest of my own ideas and having to find my way out.
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