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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.
John Dufresne
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John Dufresne
Age: 76
Born: 1948
Born: January 30
Author
Novelist
Screenwriter
Worcester
Massachusetts
Characters
Motivations
Begin
Revision
Becomes
Perceive
Imagination
Engaged
Values
Deeply
Character
Material
Come
Motivation
Materials
More quotes by John Dufresne
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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Every person in therapy has a love disorder.
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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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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 revise like crazy. I start revising before the pen hits the paper.
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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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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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Fiction begins with the senses, and the senses go to work in a place.
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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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Place is character. And all writing is regional.
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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 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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Every act of loving affirms the goodness of the lover just because he is capable of loving and being loved.
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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.
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I was always writing. I just didn't know if I was any good.
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As a writer you can and should expect to hear conflicting responses to your story.
John Dufresne
A lack of narrative structure, as you know, will cause anxiety.
John Dufresne
At the heart of all good fiction and at the heart of all good gossip is the same thing: trouble.
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The purpose of the first draft is not to get it right, but to get it written.
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.
John Dufresne
