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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
Structure
Cause
Causes
Narrative
Anxiety
Lack

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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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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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Fiction begins with the senses, and the senses go to work in a place.
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Love is anticipation and memory, uncertainty and longing. It’s unreasonable, of course. Nothing begins with so much excitement and hope and pleasure as love, except maybe writing a story. And nothing fails as often, except writing stories. And like a story, love must be troubled to be interesting.
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I had begun what I thought might be a career in social work. I was married and deeply involved in the anti-war movement. I thought I'd go about saving the world one person at a time. I worked with kids, teenagers mostly, in neighborhood centers, on the streets, and eventually in a drop-in center.
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You can't possibly conduct a proper affair without a lot of deliberating, scheming, speculating, and conniving. It's a delicate balance where the excitement must equal the guilt and sex must be as bright as the future you gamble.
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We all sleep with the corpses of our dead lovers.
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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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If you think about it, fiction is nothing more than gossip about the people you've made up.
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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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Place is character. And all writing is regional.
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Love is always a surprise and you never get it right.
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I learned to love stories by listening to them.
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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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Pleasure is, after all, a luxury. It's love that's essential.
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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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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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At the heart of all good fiction and at the heart of all good gossip is the same thing: trouble.
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Every act of loving affirms the goodness of the lover just because he is capable of loving and being loved.
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I revise like crazy. I start revising before the pen hits the paper.
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