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I sold a book six years after I left an MFA program. In between, there was a lot of endurance of poverty and a lot of fighting off doubt. It's all a part of the process of being or becoming a writer.

Chad Harbach

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Chad Harbach
Age: 49
Born: 1975
Born: January 1
Novelist
Writer
Racine
Wisconsin
Chad Daniel Harbach
Part
Program
Book
Poverty
Years
Writer
Becoming
Doubt
Fighting
Endurance
Process
Sold
Left
Six

More quotes by Chad Harbach

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For many years I didn't have health insurance.
Chad Harbach
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He already knew he could coach. All you had to do was look at each of your players and ask yourself: What story does this guy wish someone would tell him about himself? And then you told the guy that story.
Chad Harbach
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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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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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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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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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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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The challenge for any fiction writer is that your job involves simply sitting at a desk for a very, very long time.
Chad Harbach
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You are skilled. I exhort you.
Chad Harbach
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Other things awaited. It was good to be young and to know it for once. So much unfolding to do.
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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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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In fact, theres a lot to legitimately hate about pro sports and the way they are conducted.
Chad Harbach
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Fiction and nonfiction, for me, involve very different processes.
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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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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... 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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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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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