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A good novel should be deeply unsettling - its satisfactions should come from its authenticity and its formal coherence. We must feel something crucial is at stake.

Dana Spiotta

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Dana Spiotta
Age: 58
Born: 1966
Born: January 16
Author
Novelist
New Jersey
United States
Good
Deeply
Satisfactions
Satisfaction
Unsettling
Novel
Coherence
Come
Stake
Feel
Authenticity
Must
Stakes
Feels
Formal
Something
Crucial

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Getting an audience requires luck as well as talent. Some artists are private and shy. It costs them too much.
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I find poignancy in the moments when a person realizes that she has made mistakes. I am not as interested in the mistakes themselves as I am with the consequences and how the person responds to her realization.
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Your memories from your early childhood seem to have such purchase on your emotions. They are so concrete.
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I am a great procrastinator. When the writing is going really well, the laundry piles up.
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If you directly try to write about an idea, it will never be what you imagined. But if you're imagining through the building of sentences, through the characters, and paying attention to avoid ease and comfort yet still thinking about making the sentences work, you will get a shot at some real interesting stuff.
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I like to buy books for the kids in my family. I guess that's why they call me the 'mean' aunt.
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The idea that you can live off the grid and just do your own thing is a very American idea - that you should be able to do your own thing, if you want to, if you're willing to pay the price for it. I think the price has gotten higher and higher.
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I want what I write to be deeply engaging and strange and true.
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For me writing is an organic process that starts with engaging the language and then thinking about the structure of the novel as you move along. Especially in revision you start to notice correlations. Things come up, not self-consciously, because you're busy feeling your way through sentences and trying to push the language into new places.
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I like the challenge of creating a world with only sentences.
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Even a documentary portrait of a person that tries to be very accurate is shaped by the filmmaker in so many ways.
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I have to say that movies have as much impact on me as music. And that I learned as much about narrative from movies as I did from reading novels, how to arrange stories, how to juxtapose things.
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It takes a long time to write a novel when you have to keep interrupting your work to earn money.
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My teaching exists in a different part of my brain. However, I am lucky enough to teach very smart graduate students.
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The writer has to be brave, I think.
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Although a great restaurant experience must include great food, a bad restaurant experience can be achieved through bad service alone. Ideally, service is invisible. You notice it only when something goes wrong.
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Memory is not particularly linear - it is associative, repetitive, subjective and porous. But the writer needs to convey disorder and dysfunction without making the novel itself disorderly or dysfunctional.
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Tell me it's forbidden, unthinkable, and that's where I want to go. Because the chances are it's complicated, and the complications are meaningful.
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I think there's a false division people sometimes make in describing literary novels, where there are people who write systems novels, or novels of ideas, and there are people who write about emotional things in which the movement is character driven. But no good novels are divisible in that way.
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There's lots of things that can't make it in the world that are worth making. There are lots of great artists who never make it, there are lots of great writers who don't get published - is it still worthwhile? Aren't we glad people are still doing it?
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