American - Writer | -
I always tell my students to seek out other writers as models, and though it took me years to heed my own advice, it really was life-altering when I found writers who wrote long stories, full of back story and side plots and sub-histories.
Molly Antopol
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The idea that we should write towards the unknown aspects of our experience was totally groundbreaking for me. It gave me the license I needed to try to write outside myself. This attitude has deeply informed my approach to fiction, emboldening me to write characters with voices or situations that are vastly different from my own.
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In a sense, any story that anyone writes is going to be autobiographical - whether it deals directly with the author's experience or not - because it captures what we're obsessed with while working on that particular piece.
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When I'm writing a story, which takes me a year or more, I can feel my character living with me - they're responding to whatever funny, familial, or social situation I'm in, and I think about their responses constantly.
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All the stories in 'The UnAmericans' required interviews, travel, hours and hours in the archives. All of that stuff is so important in the beginning, but I reach a point where I have to shuck it away.
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I come from a big family of storytellers and, growing up, I liked hearing about the years before I was born.
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I've never believed it's a fiction writer's job to create an exact replica of the past, a diorama the reader can step right into. But it is my responsibility to learn everything of the world I'm writing about, to become an expert in the politics and history that formed my characters' identities.
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I like that it's challenging - that when I'm writing, I feel as if I'm pouring everything I have into the story until there's nothing left and I have to begin thinking about a new world and set of circumstances to research and explore.
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I've been religiously reading the O. Henry Prize anthologies every year since college, when I first began trying to write stories. Many of the authors whose work I cherish the most were people I first learned about through The O. Henry Prize Stories - and then I'd go search for their books.
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I love being in the archives, traveling, sitting in dusty places and looking at books with brittle pages. I love reading biographies and researching, to make myself informed about whatever political or historical time I'm writing about. From there, a lot of the emotional truths about my characters emerge.
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I can't imagine writing something that didn't address Jewish themes and questions. It's such a big part of my life, a lot of the way in which I experience the world.
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I've always been fascinated by family ancestry.
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