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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.
John Dufresne
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John Dufresne
Age: 76
Born: 1948
Born: January 30
Author
Novelist
Screenwriter
Worcester
Massachusetts
Usually
Gets
Word
Getting
Means
Approximate
Tighter
Better
Draft
Mean
Precise
Work
More quotes by John Dufresne
At the heart of all good fiction and at the heart of all good gossip is the same thing: trouble.
John Dufresne
Place is character. And all writing is regional.
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Revision is not the end of the creative process, but a new beginning. It's a chance not just to clean up and edit, but to open up and discover. The energetic prose comes about from all the energy that went into crafting it, I suppose.
John Dufresne
We all sleep with the corpses of our dead lovers.
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I revise like crazy. I start revising before the pen hits the paper.
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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.
John Dufresne
A pure love is a selfless love, but can desire ever be selfless?
John Dufresne
I learned to love stories by listening to them.
John Dufresne
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.
John Dufresne
Love is always a surprise and you never get it right.
John Dufresne
A lack of narrative structure, as you know, will cause anxiety.
John Dufresne
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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If you think about it, fiction is nothing more than gossip about the people you've made up.
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Every person in therapy has a love disorder.
John Dufresne
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.
John Dufresne
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 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.
John Dufresne
I was always writing. I just didn't know if I was any good.
John Dufresne
There were the fairy tales my father told to me at bedtime. All the standards. I thought my father invented wolves.
John Dufresne
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.
John Dufresne
