Quote

I love revising. If you demystify the process, it comes down to four strategies: what can I do to make the draft better what should I cut out to make it stronger what do I need to do to clarify it and finally, what should I reposition.

Wally Lamb

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Wally Lamb
Age: 74
Born: 1950
Born: October 17
Author
Novelist
Writer
Norwich
Connecticut
Comes
Strategies
Better
Draft
Need
Strategy
Needs
Finally
Make
Stronger
Love
Cutting
Four
Revising
Process
Clarify

More quotes by Wally Lamb

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Dialogue comes naturally to me and I can hear the characters' voices in the scenes.
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A woman who surrenders her freedom need not surrender her dignity.
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Hardest thing: creating something out of nothing - the first draft is torturous.
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I like to be surprised. The best writing is when it defies me, when it starts going a different way than I had planned.
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If you risked love, it took you wherever you wanted to go. If you repressed it, you ended up unhappy.
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Look, don't just stare at the pages, I used to tell my students. Become the characters. Live inside the book.
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But what are our stories if not the mirrors we hold up to our fears?
Wally Lamb
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My Italian-American heritage, of which I'm very proud and with which I identify strongly, surfaces in several of my novels.
Wally Lamb
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Power, wrongly used, defeats the oppressor as well as the oppressed.
Wally Lamb
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I won't read novels while writing novels.
Wally Lamb
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When I was a kid, I was surrounded by girls: older sisters, older girl cousins just down the street... except for an older boy named Vito who threw rocks. Each year I would wish for a baby brother. It never happened.
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I wanted to connect a modern story with a myth that I had read.
Wally Lamb
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I write to find out what the story means to me, that is what I try to do especially with the first draft.
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Change what you can, accept what you can't, and be smart enough to know the difference
Wally Lamb
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I try to stick with what moves me or teaches me about myself, same thing I hope the novels do for others.
Wally Lamb
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What if I don’t like adventure? Then cultivate a taste for it. Take a chance. That’s how you grow.
Wally Lamb
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Let me tell you something, my wife died for Tuesdays ago. Cancer of the colon. We were married forty-one years. Now you stop feeling sorry for yourself and lose some of that pork of yours. Pretty girl like you - you don't want to do this yourself.
Wally Lamb
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I think I write fiction for the opportunity to get beyond the limits of my own life.
Wally Lamb
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Fiction writing is a strange business when you think about it. You sit down and weave a network of lies to explore deeper truths.
Wally Lamb
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Connecticut is in my blood.
Wally Lamb