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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
Character
Material
Come
Motivation
Materials
Characters
Motivations
Begin
Revision
Becomes
Perceive
Imagination
Engaged
Values
Deeply
More quotes by John Dufresne
A lack of narrative structure, as you know, will cause anxiety.
John Dufresne
I revise like crazy. I start revising before the pen hits the paper.
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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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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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Love is always a surprise and you never get it right.
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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.
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
If you think about it, fiction is nothing more than gossip about the people you've made up.
John Dufresne
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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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 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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A pure love is a selfless love, but can desire ever be selfless?
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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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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 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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There were the fairy tales my father told to me at bedtime. All the standards. I thought my father invented wolves.
John Dufresne
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
I was always writing. I just didn't know if I was any good.
John Dufresne
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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Every person in therapy has a love disorder.
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