Quote

Before I begin a novel I have a strong sense of at least one central character and how the story begins, and a more vague sense of where things may wind up, but at some point, if the novel is any good at all, the story and characters take on lives of their own and take over the book, and the writer has to be open to that.

Steve Erickson

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Steve Erickson
Age: 74
Born: 1950
Born: April 20
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
Santa Monica
California
Stephen Michael Erickson
Good
Lives
Begin
Things
Strong
Wind
Sense
Writer
Stories
Novel
Character
Least
Vague
May
Open
Central
Book
Story
Begins
Take
Point
Characters

More quotes by Steve Erickson

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To me experimental fiction ultimately is about the experiment and I'm not interested in experiments for their own sake.
Steve Erickson
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Western music is arguably America's greatest contribution to the 20th century, cultural or otherwise.
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It became inescapable that as conservatives were wrong about people of color, they were also wrong about women. They were wrong about gay people. The only individual freedoms they seemed to get exercised about were the freedom to make a profit and the freedom to own a gun.
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If I had it to do all over again . . . I wouldn't change a thing.'. . . the final expression of narcissism, the last gesture of self-congratulation.
Steve Erickson
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The form is always integral to the expression of the theme or to the sheer telling of the story, and sometimes the right form is apparent to me from the outset and sometimes it isn't.
Steve Erickson
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a dream is only a memory of the future
Steve Erickson
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I'm my own ideal reader in the sense that I write novels that I would want to read.
Steve Erickson
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I believe novels can have secrets from their author, a notion I imagine would appall Nabokov.
Steve Erickson
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Strip away the morphing landscapes and rips in the space-time continuum, and my stories are about things that novels have always been about: love and sex and identity and memory and history and redemption.
Steve Erickson
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It wouldn't have occurred to me that while this old white man, which is to say me, was voting for Hillary Clinton, white women were choosing an overt misogynist [Donald Trump] over the first woman president. Someone will have to explain that one to me someday.
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Is the humanism intuitive or labored over?, the answer is: Yes. It begins intuitively, it becomes the reason for writing the thing, and then it's to be considered and fine-tuned and even calculated.
Steve Erickson
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My own personal experience has become more first-hand.
Steve Erickson
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I began composing the next poem, the one that was to be written next. Not the last poem of those I had read, but the poem written in the head of someone who may never have existed but who had certainly written another poem nonetheless, and just never had the chance to commit it to ink and the page.
Steve Erickson
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To me experimental fiction ultimately is about the experiment and I'm not interested in experiments for their own sake, and if anything I've always steered a bit clear of that kind of thing, because it seems gimmicky to play around with text rather than do the work of telling a story and creating characters.
Steve Erickson
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When L.A.’s schizophrenia between Dreamland and Utopia was becoming socially manifest, the United States, which was always a place, went to war with America, which was always an idea.
Steve Erickson
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The material dictates the approach. I tell the stories in the way that feels natural to tell them. Certainly the last thing I want is to be difficult.
Steve Erickson
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In the end I write the novels I need to write when I need to write them.
Steve Erickson
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In essence I'm really a very traditional writer. I subscribe to the notion that, ultimately, characters do drive everything else.
Steve Erickson
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The last thing I want is that sense of artifice - rather I want the reader drawn into the story and lost in it and vested in it. So the emotional connection is everything, albeit a connection on my terms.
Steve Erickson
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I write almost purely by instinct. I've never made an outline.
Steve Erickson