I have a B.A. in Spanish, so briefly I thought that somebody might pay me to speak Spanish badly in another country, like Norway.
In short stories there's more permission to be elliptical. You can have image-logic, or it's almost like a poem in that you can come to a lot of meanings within a short space.
When I'm drafting, I suppose it's an intuitive process - figuring out when something just has a surreal glaze on it and when it grapples with something that could threaten a character's day-to-day reality.
I am extremely close to my brother, Kent, and my sister, Lauren, who have been remarkably understanding about all of my weird sibling tales.
It remains unbelievable to me that I have any readers beyond my own blood relations - it's a crazy, wild gift.
No, I don’t have to tell a soul about this, I promised myself. When you are a kid, you don’t know yet that a secret, like an animal, can evolve. Like an animal, a secret can develop a self-preserving intelligence. Shaglike, mute and thick, a knowledge wit
Get out of your comfort zone. Keep reading outside of your comfort zone. If you’re a fiction junkie, read biography. All writers should read poetry.
Write badly. If you can make peace with the fact that you will likely have to throw out 90 percent of your first draft, then you can relax and even almost enjoy ‘writing badly.’
Follow your writing instinct. Some stories were rigorously mapped out, while drafting others felt more like shaking a Polaroid and waiting for it to come into focus.
Focus and progress. I can produce a lot of words, but volume is not the best metric for me. It’s more a question of, did I write for four or five hours of focused time, when I did not leave my desk, didn’t find some distraction to take me out of the world
Write diversely. Sometimes the protagonists are teenagers, or vampires and even horses! Russell creates these characters so masterfully that their voices are clear, distinct, and most of all, memorable.
Keep reading outside of your comfort zone. If you’re a fiction junkie, read biography. All writers should read poetry.
Self-discipline is necessary, but so is playfulness, flexibility, joy. When you stop demanding perfection of yourself, your writing desk will become a spacious place.
It took me the bulk of my twenties to write one book about a family of alligator wrestlers. Whereas somebody like Steve Martin is releasing his latest banjo symphony, having just completed another movie and acclaimed, best-selling novel.
It's funny to think about the uncanny reflexively, as an author who is perhaps gradually becoming aware of my own hidden secrets. Accessing that shadowy territory really requires the physical act of writing.
I really try to write every day. It's hard, but it's my favorite thing to do, so it's usually not too, too hard.
I moved to New York with the derangement of love. I was writing all these terrible stories, but I had never been happier.
I have friends who are capable of writing a very rough draft and then going back and embroidering - they're sort of the cathedral builders of fiction.
In short stories there's more permission to be elliptical. You can have image-logic, or it's almost like a poem in that you can come to a lot of meanings within a short space.
Sometimes, when you're writing sentence by sentence, you're not really sure what footprints you're going to fall into, or what ghosts might appear.
It's funny to think about the uncanny reflexively, as an author who is perhaps gradually becoming aware of my own hidden secrets.
And I do think that great fiction, even when it's comedic, has an urgency or an inevitability to it, a sense that the writer absolutely had to write this particular story in this way.
Sometimes it can feel like the whole globe is spinning with irredeemable losses, capricious natural disasters and crimes so outrageously evil they dismantle any attempt to solve or explain them.
