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A lack of narrative structure, as you know, will cause anxiety.

John Dufresne

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John Dufresne
Age: 76
Born: 1948
Born: January 30
Author
Novelist
Screenwriter
Worcester
Massachusetts
Narrative
Anxiety
Lack
Structure
Cause
Causes

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We all sleep with the corpses of our dead lovers.
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What you create when you're teaching fiction writing is a kind of literary salon, not a social club or a mutual admiration society, not a debating society, not a repair shop, not a fight club or a soap box. It's a place to have a conversation about a story.
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There were the fairy tales my father told to me at bedtime. All the standards. I thought my father invented wolves.
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I was always writing. I just didn't know if I was any good.
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With each draft, the work gets better, and usually that means tighter. It means getting the precise word, not the approximate word.
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Actually, my first literary heroes were the Romantic poets, so I began to get serious by writing poems. I have notebooks full of them that I cherish but am afraid to look at.
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Pleasure is, after all, a luxury. It's love that's essential.
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Reading honest literature makes you love the world. Knowledge and understanding are love. Reading educates our feelings and enhances our sympathy. When you read for understanding, you are fundamentally changed. You are a different person at the end of the story or the novel than you were when it began.
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I grew up in a house without many books. The books the nuns made us read in school didn't interest me.
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Fiction begins with the senses, and the senses go to work in a place.
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The regional tags are often pejorative and dismissive. Don't think of place-bound stories, in other words, but of stories with a strong sense of place.
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I sat around the kitchen every Sunday afternoon listening to my mother and aunts talk about the people in the neighborhood. Gossip - I loved it. And that turns out to be the writer's job: to attend to the gossip and spread it as far as you can.
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The facts, however, are unimportant in fiction. It's not the events of my life that I mine, but the emotional experiences I've had.
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If you think about it, fiction is nothing more than gossip about the people you've made up.
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The landscape of childhood shapes us as it shapes the characters in our stories. You never forget the sacred places of your childhood.
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In revision, your imagination becomes deeply engaged with your material. It's when you come to know your characters and begin to perceive their motivations and values.
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At the heart of all good fiction and at the heart of all good gossip is the same thing: trouble.
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I revise like crazy. I start revising before the pen hits the paper.
John Dufresne
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Place is character. And all writing is regional.
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Every act of loving affirms the goodness of the lover just because he is capable of loving and being loved.
John Dufresne