Quote

I've always wrestled with the difference between plot and structure, and after re-reading a lot of writing books I realized I wasn't alone.

Jeff VanderMeer

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Jeff VanderMeer
Age: 56
Born: 1968
Born: July 7
Journalist
Literary Critic
Novelist
Science Fiction Writer
Writer
Bellefonte
Pennsylvania
Jeffrey Scott VanderMeer
Reading
Plot
Book
Realized
Writing
Structure
Always
Difference
Wasn
Differences
Alone
Books
Wrestled

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I like to go through the zine sections of local bookstores when on the road and have found a lot of really great kind of underground stuff that way. It all feeds into everything else.
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History has shown us all too often the consequences of dreaming poorly or not at all.
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There's also a lot of gritty Americana type of bands. I actually have a lot of Britpop on my iPod, too.
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So many differing opinions and philosophies... are rarely housed under the roof of a single magazine.
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I had learned so much about the world that I had decided to withdraw from it.
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Who had the bigger burden? The one who had to watch the other person endure or the one who endured?
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Silence creates it's own violence.
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But what if you discover that the price of purpose is to render invisible so many other things?
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What occurs after revelation and paralysis?
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I always try to be alert to the potential for repetition, for a decaying orbit with regard to my use of technique, etc.
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You can either waste time worrying about a death that might not come or concentrate on what’s left to you.
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If I wasn't a writer, I don't know what I'd be. Probably a marine biologist or something.
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The music I listen to while writing is really scene-specific. It's just a great motivator, a way to put myself in the mood.
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It is the nature of the writer to question the validity of his world and yet rely on his senses to describe it. From what other tension can great literature be born?
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The stories in Get In Trouble confirm once again that Kelly Link is a modern virtuoso of the form-playful and subversive required reading for anyone who loves short fiction.
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Angela Carter, Leonora Carrington, even nonsurrealists like Kafka and Nabokov - writers like these, who create paths between the firmly grounded and flights of fantasy, are my personal North Star.
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When they give you things, ask yourself why. When you're grateful to them for giving you the things you should have anyway, ask yourself why.
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Angela Carter's fiction blew me away and really instilled a passion for writing, bolstered by Vladimir Nabokov. But in general, I can't point to any one thing. I just always loved books and writing.
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I also am not particularly risk-averse - I don't mind jumping off a cliff if I trust the people who've told me they'll catch me at the bottom.
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I’ve got...ways of tricking my brain into getting what I need out of it
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