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I usually do at least a dozen drafts and progressively make more-conscious decisions. Because I've always believed stories are closer to poems than novels, I spend a lot of time on the story's larger rhythms, such as sentence and paragraph length, placement of flashbacks and dialogue.

Ron Rash

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Ron Rash
Age: 71
Born: 1953
Born: September 21
Novelist
Poet
Short Story Writer
Teacher
Writer
Chester
South Carolina
Ron Vincent Rash
Novel
Sentences
Paragraph
Least
Dialogue
Poems
Decision
Rhythm
Dozen
Story
Believed
Sentence
Flashback
Stories
Decisions
Novels
Progressively
Make
Conscious
Closer
Placement
Always
Spend
Larger
Drafts
Time
Usually
Length
Rhythms

More quotes by Ron Rash

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A small profit is better than a big loss.
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A place where something so terrible had happened shouldn't continue to exist in the world
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Short fiction is the medium I love the most, because it requires that I bring everything I've learned about poetry - the concision, the ability to say something as vividly as possible - but also the ability to create a narrative that, though lacking a novel's length, satisfies the reader.
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I wouldn't mind being a track and field coach.
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Faulkner came from my region and taught me how you could write about a place.
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It's a hard place this world can be. No wonder a baby cries coming in to it. Tears from the start
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One thing's sure and nothing surer. The rich get richer and the poor get- children
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I live in Cullowhee, North Carolina. That's where I teach, at Western Carolina University. That region is where my family has lived for a long time and that region is my landscape.
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Don't love anything that can be taken away.
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On the last drafts, I focus on the words themselves, including the rub of vowels and consonants, stressed and unstressed syllables. Yet even at this stage I'm often surprised. A different ending or a new character shows up and I'm back to where I began, letting the story happen, just trying to stay out of the way.
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But nothing is solid and permanent. Our lives are raised on the shakiest foundations. You don't need to read history books to know that. You only have to know the history of your own life.
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Peter Geye has rendered the Minnesota north shore in all its stark, dangerous beauty, and it is the perfect backdrop for this deeply moving story of conflict and forgiveness. Safe from the Sea is a remarkable debut.
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As I get older I find myself thinking it all begins with Shakespeare.
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I learnt how to hunt rattlesnakes with an eagle for Serena.
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She realized that being starved for words was the same as being starved for food, because both left a hollow place inside you, a place you needed filled to make it through another day. Rachel remembered how growing up she’d thought living on a farm with just a father was as lonely as you could be. (130)
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Sometimes I know what my characters are moving away from or toward more often I just wait and see. For instance, though I knew Sinkler in 'The Trusty' was going for water, I did not know that he would meet a fetching young farm wife until I got him into her front yard.
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We had some good times at school. I didn't know how good those times were until I left, but I guess that's the way of it
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It’s ever been the way of the man of science or philosophy. Most folks stay in the dark and then complain they can’t see nothing.” – Snipes (185)
Ron Rash
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It struck her how eating was a comfort during a hard time because it reminded you that there had been other days, good days, when you’d eaten the same thing. Reminded you there were good days in life, when precious little else did. (268)
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Intensely moving but never sentimental, Academy Street is a profound meditation on what Faulkner called 'the human heart in conflict with itself'. In Tess Lohan, Mary Costello has created one of the most fully realized characters in contemporary fiction. What a marvel of a book.
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