Collections Quotes - Page 26

• Some of the stories in Dogwalker were written as long as four years ago, but I wouldn't say I've been working on this collection for four years. I have always been a little unsure of whether I could make it as a writer so I've held other jobs and worked on other projects this whole time.

  Arthur Bradford

  Jobs, Years, Long

  Source: www.bookbrowse.com

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• I wanted to do a collection where the narrator is constant throughout, so that there's a little unity.

  Arthur Bradford

  Unity, Narrators, Littles

  Source: www.bookbrowse.com

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• The first story I wrote was "Catface" which was later selected for The O. Henry Collection, so that gave me some confidence to try some more. Gathering these stories together was fun, but I realized when I read them that I have certain mental preoccupations and they keep recurring in my stories.

  Arthur Bradford

  Fun, Trying, Together

  Source: www.bookbrowse.com

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• I write most of my first drafts on an old manual typewriter, a really old one. It's a big black metal "Woodstock" from about 1920. I try to write everything down at once, in one sitting. The longer stories in this collection are divided up into sections. Each section represents a different sitting, a different idea for the same story.

  Arthur Bradford

  Writing, Typewriters, Ideas

  Source: www.bookbrowse.com

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• I'm interested in other animals too though. There's the slug in "Mollusks", and I wrote a story about bees and one about a cat which got thrown out a window by mistake, but those never made it into the collection.

  Arthur Bradford

  Mistake, Cat, Animal

  Source: www.bookbrowse.com

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• I'd just like to point out that almost all of these stories in this collection were rejected by some publication at one time or another, some of them have been rejected a lot, in fact. Find people you trust and listen to them.

  Arthur Bradford

  People, Stories, Facts

  Source: www.bookbrowse.com

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• I have a lot of different collections of cards at home. It's hard to say my favorite deck, but there is a deck called the medicine cards, and it's Native American animal cards.

  Valerie June

  Home, Native American, Animal

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• I never try to force poems into a collection simply because they were written/published within a certain period of time. They will eventually find their perfect home.

  Rigoberto Gonzalez

  Home, Perfect, Trying

  Source: therumpus.net

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• The point is, this is what happens when advertising and data collection is the dominant business mode. We are encouraged to be compulsive. It's not that we're terrible addicts who need to go to an AA meeting and get off our gadgets.

  Astra Taylor

  Data Collection, Needs, Gadgets

  Source: therumpus.net

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• I kept writing short stories and sending out my manuscript, and it kept coming back like a bad penny. It was rejected all over town, quite often in very complimentary terms, but rejected nonetheless. Agents would return it saying that they loved it but didn't think they could sell it, or they would ask if I could change the collection into linked stories.

  Debra Dean

  Writing, Thinking, Stories

  Source: therumpus.net

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• Every time I put a collection together I'd scrap it because there was no "meaning," until I wrote about the two black men - friends - in the beginning of the book. So much of their experience was ABOUT trying to find friends in the authors/artists I wrote about - subjects that were/are a source of comfort, somehow, since none of them "fit," either

  Hilton Als

  Book, Artist, Men

  Source: therumpus.net

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• I have very rarely written autobiographical stuff. "Greasy Lake" and some other works have some autobiographical elements, as does "Birnam Wood," the one I chose to end [this collection] with. I lived in that house and some of my feelings are expressed in it, but it's not autobiography. It was not me and that didn't happen exactly that way.

  T.C. Boyle

  Lakes, House, Feelings

  Source: therumpus.net

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• I do love the ceremony of putting on a record but I don't have space for a vinyl collection.

  Annie E. Clark

  Space, Records, Vinyl

  Source: pitchfork.com

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• A collection, for me, is a book of very diverse stories that somehow speak to each other, across wide geography, across time, years, decades.

  Peter Orner

  Book, Years, Stories

  Source: therumpus.net

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• A good mixtape didn't just gather together a bunch of love songs, but instead created an emotional narrative specific to your affection. The stories in most of my favorite collections are collected more like songs on a mixtape than, say, collected like spare change. By which I mean they are in conversation with each other and work to become larger than their parts.

  Anthony Marra

  Song, Mean, Emotional

  Source: therumpus.net

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• Some writers keep a tighter rein on that than others. For short story collections I'm definitely in the loose-rein camp.

  Roy Kesey

  Stories, Short Story, Reins

  Source: therumpus.net

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• You know how some people say that they can only read one story a day from this or that collection? If that's simply the result of the great tension and power condensed into each piece, all well and good.

  Roy Kesey

  People, Stories, Pieces

  Source: therumpus.net

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• Very often, or perhaps more often, and even in very good collections - even in some of the best collections ever written, I would argue - it's because our "voicier" writers hew so closely to one given set of dictional tics that we as readers can't read the books all the way through in a single sitting, because if we did, the stories and their narrators would all start to bleed together.

  Roy Kesey

  Book, Together, Narrators

  Source: therumpus.net

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• For whatever reason, thus far it's been important to me not to write that kind of collection. Which means that I've spent months playing tic-tac-notecard, trying to get the stories in an order whereby stories that are similar in any given way (diction, narrative stance, setting, plot) are separated by others that aren't.

  Roy Kesey

  Writing, Mean, Order

  Source: therumpus.net

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• What I like about organizing things that way is that each story gets nearly full reign over its own space, but all of them are hung on a single string - the loosely-reined voice mentioned above. Thus the collection jogs away from suzerainty and past federation toward, I guess, alliance. Or maybe call each story a separate house on a single street? Or it's all a line of dive bars on some wharf front? What the hell, let's call reading the collection a pub crawl, but with words.

  Roy Kesey

  Reading, Past, Voice

  Source: therumpus.net

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• I start every first draft with voice rather than theme or image or even character as such, so it isn't like I'm ever rubbing my hands, cackling, "The dad is really going to take it on the chin in this one!" Not in terms of any given story, and certainly not in terms of the collection as a whole.

  Roy Kesey

  Dad, Character, Hands

  Source: therumpus.net

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• But it's hard for me to pinpoint where all my characters and dialogue come from - imagination or real life. My memoir, of course, was all about my past, and many of the short stories cleave very closely to my life, but the more stories I wrote in the collection, the more that seemed to be invented, but who knows... I think I'm writing about a young woman with acne who shoplifts, but I'm really writing about myself.

  Said Sayrafiezadeh

  Real, Writing, Character

  Source: therumpus.net

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• The benefit of writing a collection - as opposed to a novel - is that I'm able to have some version of the war in each story without having to comment on its all-encompassing nature. Turn the page and here are new characters and new situations, but the war remains... Isn't that how life has been for us for over a decade?

  Said Sayrafiezadeh

  War, Writing, Character

  Source: therumpus.net

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• At the moment we are facing a whole collection of difficult to forecast developments from the situation in China and the oil-price crash to the worrying news from some banks in Europe and the US. All of that is linked: Worldwide company debt is high and there is a lot of money in circulation. That is why necessary structural reforms are not being made.

  Wolfgang Schauble

  Europe, Oil, Worry

  Source: www.spiegel.de

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• We are facing a whole collection of crisis-like developments that we have to watch closely. But we also have to be careful what we point to as crisis indicators.

  Wolfgang Schauble

  Development, Watches, Crisis

  Source: www.spiegel.de

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