Quote

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
Order
Stories
Undeserving
Character
Badness
Give
Innocent
Giving
Characters
Make
Trouble
Story
Poor

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I don't have the courage not to write all the time.
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I think you have to remember that writing is hard my first editor used to say that to me.
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I think the difference between writing as someone and writing for them is that when you write for someone, you take on a kind of political burden or message, which I don't think we have the right to do.
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Sometimes people want to know how to write a story from the point of view of a murderer and make her sympathetic. I think the answer is that you start by having her look for her car keys, because everybody knows what it's like.
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I think a day in your life on which nothing bad happens may be a wonderful day, but it probably isn't going to be the basis of a story.
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There's the belief that we can't be smart enough to write. And certainly censorship of women, too.
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I love to read nonfiction and memoir, but I'm mostly interested in the piece of writing more than the person.
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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.
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I just like doing it, I like writing.
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I'm very secretive. I'll write a whole novel and revise it, which might take me two years or more, and the people I know best don't know what I'm writing about.
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Sometimes I write well when I'm very upset.
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The main thing is to explain to yourself that everybody suffers.
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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.
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It's a scary thing for fiction writers, when you're always writing from the point of view both as and for someone who is different.
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The making of fiction takes literally what is suggested by our imagination.
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Whoever would write books? It's suffering as well as greatly satisfying. And certainly there's suffering in the sense that you don't know for a long time how to do it.
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Telling someone to be confident in the abstract is not going to make it easier for the unconfident writer to actually get herself or himself to the point of being able to put in the upsetting stuff.
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Little children are all writers.
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There are so many different ways, most of them helpful and legal, to get yourself into a state of mind where writing is possible. It's going to be different for each person.
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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.
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