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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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Chad Harbach
Age: 49
Born: 1975
Born: January 1
Novelist
Writer
Racine
Wisconsin
Chad Daniel Harbach
Right
Discover
Hard
Pages
Sometimes
Beyond
Feels
Either
Work
Written
Shaping
Something
Looking
Notebook
Way
Process
Intuitive
Doesn
Page

More quotes by 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.
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In fact, theres a lot to legitimately hate about pro sports and the way they are conducted.
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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.
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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.
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You are skilled. I exhort you.
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To my parents, writing seemed precarious and not the best idea.
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If you're part of any kind of writerly community, some of those people will have gone through MFA programs, and their thinking leaks into yours. So whatever changes MFAs have made to the culture, it's to the culture as a whole. It can't be pinned down to individual books in a way that some people would like to do.
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Each of us, deep down, believes that the whole world issues from his own precious body, like images projected from a tiny slide onto an earth-sized screen. And then, deeper down, each of us knows he's wrong.
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Fiction and nonfiction, for me, involve very different processes.
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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.
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There are three stages: Thoughtless being. Thought. Return to thoughtless being.
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The novel has always been the form that incorporates other forms. For me, it has always been the ultimate medium.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Most writers, most books, you have no idea whether it was a dollar or a million dollars.
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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.
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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.
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Other things awaited. It was good to be young and to know it for once. So much unfolding to do.
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