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We have to give our poor, innocent, and undeserving-of-our-badness characters trouble in order to make them characters in a story.
Alice Mattison
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Alice Mattison
Age: 82
Born: 1942
Born: March 18
Novelist
New York City
New York
Make
Trouble
Story
Poor
Order
Stories
Undeserving
Character
Badness
Give
Innocent
Giving
Characters
More quotes by Alice Mattison
I think you have to remember that writing is hard my first editor used to say that to me.
Alice Mattison
I think we need to develop the courage to write from the viewpoint of people who may seem quite different from ourselves, who might have a different sexual orientation or a different race or a different ethnicity.
Alice Mattison
There seems to be a tremendous desire among many people now to know authors and how they work, to know what's autobiographical and what isn't.
Alice Mattison
I love it when people can help me with my work, so I do show it.
Alice Mattison
I've been astonished how often, when I convince a writer to tell a story more straightforwardly and to tell it more simply and directly, it turns out that this author is great and the story is wonderful.
Alice Mattison
I think that inevitably, the trouble our characters go through is a kind of metaphor for what's happening in ourselves.
Alice Mattison
Sometimes indirect style and varying chronology is great, but quite often I've seen it be just something that gets in the way. It turns out when I talk to the writer that she or he, and more often it's a woman, that she's worried.
Alice Mattison
You can't tell a writer they should just be more confident.
Alice Mattison
When I've taught writing to five, six, and seven year olds, it's not very different than talking to an adult writer. They're writers then, and when they get to be young teenagers they're not anymore. You might go and talk to them about writing, and they'll be very self-conscious or will have detached themselves from the group.
Alice Mattison
If you have a character stand up and put on her shoes and open the door, in order to do that, you're imagining her shoes and her clothes and her house and her door. The character becomes more real. But once you've done that, you can probably just get it all across with a couple of details.
Alice Mattison
Anyone with an imagination can write about the day-to-day experiences of someone he or she is not.
Alice Mattison
I find that I get very excited about what my students are up to and that I get to be the hurdle they need to jump over.
Alice Mattison
In many cultures, women are sometimes literally kept from learning to read or from going to school.
Alice Mattison
You have to write fiction that mirrors the actual world, which has people of all sorts in it.
Alice Mattison
Sometimes it's interesting to see what people who have too much control need to do to write freely.
Alice Mattison
Inevitably we start by thinking that if our work is any good, we'll get money. It's as we would if you started up a business or if you work in another profession.
Alice Mattison
I had never written about what it's like to live the life of a writer, and I had never read a book that combined talking about the life of writing and how you can do it, how you can stand it, how you can emotionally manage it, with the choices that we all make on the page.
Alice Mattison
I actually think it's sometimes easier for the control freaks to let loose.
Alice Mattison
There is a lot of censorship about writing that's exerted from all directions, from families or governments and society, even the fear of being offensive in some way.
Alice Mattison
Little children are all writers.
Alice Mattison