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I always wished to be a better planner. It seems more elegant, while my trial and error process is more akin to someone scratching an awful case of poison oak.

Joshua Mohr

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Joshua Mohr
Age: 48
Born: 1976
Born: July 8
Author
Writer
Errors
Oaks
Case
Wished
Cases
Trial
Process
Elegant
Someone
Error
Planner
Seems
Poison
Scratching
Better
Trials
Planners
Always
Awful
Akin

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I struggle with staying clean every day, and what really keeps me from doing something stupid is my daughter.
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For the book to succeed, it has to have equal parts ugliness and beauty, counterpoints adding up to emotional complexity. To me, there's a dignity in letting your art be emotionally complex.
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It's important to write like your readers are brilliant.
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It's a beautiful aspect of narrative construction, hunting for the right images and metaphors to render our character's hearts/minds/souls as though they're ecosystems, full-fledged settings for a reader to inhabit like a place.
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I'm not a gamer. But I am very aware of the escapism of drugs. In my mind those kind of do the same thing. They dull us to the aches and pains of our status quo.
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The question why, at least in my life, often leads to despair. Why did this happen to me? Why didn't someone who claimed to love me treat me with respect, compassion, kindness? Etc. These questions never have answers. They are an ocean, and you'll never swim to the other side. Eventually, you'll tire and die.
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The point of reading is to inhabit a consciousness that doesn't belong to the reader, immersing yourself in a life that's wholly realized. And a huge facet of our psychic and existential make-ups is the things we're not proud of, things we didn't ask to experience, the scenarios we flubbed.
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It was important to buy into the fact that the nine hundred pages an end-reader never sees are just as valuable as the ones that are bound and placed on the shelf.
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My father deprived me of any truths about himself. He died without ever letting me know who he truly was. I only knew his facades, basically. And it breaks my heart that he never trusted me enough to tell me the truth.
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If a character is honest with a reader, then (hopefully) that will engage the reader's empathy centers she'll meet that openness with acceptance, and they'll forge a nourishing and meaningful bond as the book continues.
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Memoirs need confusion. It's the thing every human has in common. We are magnificently confused.
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My musical sensibilities were formed around punk rock, that quintessential dilution of an art that's both ugly and lovely at the same time.
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I used to consider myself to be a cineophile, and then I had a daughter. Ha! Now I barely see any movies.
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I want to be the kind of adult that keeps learning. I want to always be open to new experiences.
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I never wanted/expected to write a memoir, but this life thing, it has a way of sideswiping our worlds, scaring us so thoroughly that our past lenses of contextualizing events don't work - they cease to matter.
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In my life the right question is simply this: What can I do to be happy today?
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Shamefulness is always a huge part of my characterizations. I like protagonists that reveal, either through honesty in their various thought processes or via their actions, perhaps telling us things they're not so keen on disclosing through their interactions with the outside world. Probably both during the duration of a novel.
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If Dante was writing The Divine Comedy in 2013, he might very well have set part of it in the suburbs.
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Memoir is a unique opportunity to revisit yourself. I don't mean by memory. I mean in the revision process. You don't just write a chapter and that's it. You must constantly return to it. You must dote on it. And even if it's saying something ugly about who you are, you have to find the poetry in it. You have to find the poetry in yourself.
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We have today and hopefully tomorrow to be the best version of ourselves.
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