American - Writer | March 1, 1970 -
I guess when you write a personal story, people feel compelled to share their own stories.
Darin Strauss
PeopleStoryFeelYouPersonalOwn
My knowledge of trains - and love before first sight, love at negative-one sight - comes from Alfred Hitchcock.
LoveKnowledgeSightFirstTrains
Perhaps it's because a writer lives in Brooklyn that he'd want to get away from it. It can be very sustaining, this community of writers - sometimes it's the feeling of many hands giving you a boost. But all that identical ambition can be choking, too. The many hands slide up to your throat.
CommunityAmbitionGivingHandsYou
I have twin six-year-old boys. Have no mojo. The closest thing to a mojo I have is five minutes of peace.
PeaceFiveMinutesMojoTwinThing
For the fiction students I teach, one of the most common mistakes is to start in the wrong place. Often the actual story doesn't begin until about a third of the way into their narratives. They start off instead with excessive scene-setting, metaphysical speculation, introducing nonessential dramatis personae, throat-clearing, etc.
MistakesStartStoryWrongPlace
Like all writing rules, the injunction to start with the trouble can be broken, and it should be sometimes - if there's good reason.
GoodBrokenWritingStartRules
The main thing is to think strategically about what will engage your readers. Trust me when I tell you that few people are eager to read a story whose opening lines sound like a dissertation on giant bugs.
TrustPeopleMeStoryThinkYou
I'm no fan of jam bands. You can take your Gov't Mule, your Phish, your Rusted Root. But Derek Trucks is a special musician - perhaps the greatest slide guitarist who ever lived.
YouSpecialMuleLivedTakeFan
My wife and I live in Brooklyn, N.Y., not too far from where my Long Island childhood happened.
LiveChildhoodWifeLongBrooklyn
Surprisingly, Manhattan casts a sort of undersized shadow onto Long Island. Where I grew up, everyone seemed totally disconnected from the city - ours could have been any suburb, anywhere - though when traffic was thin, it took us only half an hour to get into midtown.
ShadowCityLongTrafficIslandUp
Memoirs are - memory is - rarely 100 percent accurate. Any autobiography is a construct, ballpark, even unnatural. Private diaries, too, can be unreliable - a detail that matters only if the diary is read.
MemoryDetailMattersDiaryPercent
I went to Aspen right after school and got a freelance gig writing articles for the 'Aspen Times.' I was their nightlife correspondent. They paid me fifty bucks an article.
SchoolMeWritingRightFiftyPaid
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