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Anthropological fieldwork is so much like writing a novel. You don't know what the hell is going on.

Lily King

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Lily King
Age: 54
Novelist
University Teacher
Writer
the United States of America
Much
Like
Fieldwork
Anthropological
Novel
Hell
Writing
Going

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I tend to elongate the sentences as I'm writing and editing, and there is just something about the feeling of writing longhand that I really love.
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When I finished graduate school, the first George Bush was president, and I really wanted to get out of the country. We'd just gone through the first Gulf War.
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Perhaps all science is merely self-investigation.
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When you have people who get angry quickly, you have to learn the rules to avoid being in that situation.
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You write the facts as you see them, and there isn't a lull with a lot of description. No wonder people like to write about murder mysteries and dead bodies!
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Anthropology is separated from mass reading, and that is something that bothered Margaret Mead. She always said that she wrote everything for her grandmother, in a way that her grandmother could understand what she was saying.
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Usually, the creating of the book happens while I'm writing the book. I start with Chapter One, with a few ideas and a handful of characters, and the book grows from there.
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I don't like stories where I'm being given pages and pages of detail.
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It also signals to me, when I pick up a pencil, that this is a rough draft. This is not going anywhere, and no one's going to see it. You have permission to make all the mistakes you want. It signals freedom to me, and it signals mistakes.
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I've always thought of writing as sort of active communication.
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To go back to my childhood, I experienced lots of different family cultures, all the while feeling like none of them were mine.
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There are certain tribes in the middle Sepik that eat raw bat. A certain kind of raw bat is a delicacy.
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I've also done things that put me in odd situations.
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I'm always interested in a claustrophobic situation where people might be powerless to do things.
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I have three stepfamilies as well as my family of origin. I've had to adjust to them and also go back and forth among them. I became an observer of human nature because when you are in those situations you have to be.
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I definitely feel that my brain works differently, and words come out differently, if I have a pencil in my hand, rather than if I have a keyboard.
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I think of companies like Nokia having anthropologists who study how people use cell phones, who do that kind of commercial and marketing work, selling out to corporations. I wonder if that has something to do with the image of the more innocent anthropologist, now gone.
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There are very few things I would love to do other than a life of writing, and I think being a singer-songwriter and being an anthropologist are the two other things I can imagine doing.
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I had one family that used a lot of yelling and screaming, and that was very normal. Another side of my family, nobody would raise their voice at all.
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I had lived in France before graduate school, but because of Spain, I had a lot of the characters go and spend a good bit of time in Spain.
Lily King