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The effects of MFA programs, and the rise of creative writing instruction more generally, are far more diffuse than people think. Even if you're a writer who has avoided institutions your whole life, you're still going to be reading a lot of writers who have MFAs, and are affiliated with universities.

Chad Harbach

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Chad Harbach
Age: 49
Born: 1975
Born: January 1
Novelist
Writer
Racine
Wisconsin
Chad Daniel Harbach
Even
Effects
Programs
Going
Writer
Instruction
Think
Creative
Generally
Thinking
Reading
Rise
Life
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University
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Still
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More quotes by Chad Harbach

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I tended to write the book in these bursts of two or three months at a time. So I would know, or at least feel securely, that for the next few months I was at least going to have a few hours a day.
Chad Harbach
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I mean, first, almost all writers these days teach because they don't make enough money publishing to live on, to support themselves - people like Tobias Wolff, Anne Beattie, Amy Hempel, Stuart Dybek a lot of short story writers, for one thing.
Chad Harbach
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You are skilled. I exhort you.
Chad Harbach
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Another older writer that had a huge influence on me is Chekhov. More contemporarily, it's hard to say.
Chad Harbach
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The novel has always been the form that incorporates other forms. For me, it has always been the ultimate medium.
Chad Harbach
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Baseball is a team game but, at the same time, it's a very lonely game: unlike in soccer or basketball, where players roam around, in baseball everyone has their little plot of the field to tend. When the action comes to you, the spotlight is on you but no one can help you.
Chad Harbach
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Fiction and nonfiction, for me, involve very different processes.
Chad Harbach
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In fact, theres a lot to legitimately hate about pro sports and the way they are conducted.
Chad Harbach
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Every dude in your high school wasn't striving to be the best poet because then he'd get all the girls, right? But you could imagine a society in which that were the case.
Chad Harbach
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I'm just kind of really interested in athletes as artists of a pretty serious variety and people who devote themselves to what they do in a really incredible way.
Chad Harbach
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There are no whys in a person's life, and very few hows. In the end, in search of useful wisdom, you could only come back to the most hackneyed concepts, like kindness, forbearance, infinite patience. Solomon and Lincoln: This too shall pass. Damn right it will. Or Chekhov: Nothing passes. Equally true.
Chad Harbach
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Somehow, you can achieve a directness in the novel that you can't get anywhere else.
Chad Harbach
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Looking at and shaping your own work is a very intuitive process. You see something you've written in your notebook. It's there on the page and either feels right or it doesn't, and it's hard sometimes to go beyond that and discover why it feels that way.
Chad Harbach
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I feel like every time I start up, it's like a truck you have to get into 15th gear, so you very solely crank into that mental space where you feel really immersed in the world of the book and then you can just kind of go.
Chad Harbach
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Poetry might be more about the eternal verities, the essence of the human soul, and - although it's reductive to say so - fiction has perhaps been more about the differences between the unconstrained world of the imagination and the realities you run into, day-to-day, when you're riding your donkey.
Chad Harbach
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It is no fun at all to have been writing a book for seven or so years, especially when you've never published anything before.
Chad Harbach
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... people loved to suffer, as long as the suffering made sense. Everybody suffered. The key was to choose the form of your suffering.
Chad Harbach
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Most writers, most books, you have no idea whether it was a dollar or a million dollars.
Chad Harbach
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A lot of my close friends had tolerantly washed their hands of the whole idea of me writing a book. They had said to themselves, I don't know what he's doing.
Chad Harbach
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For many years I didn't have health insurance.
Chad Harbach