Mood:
chillin'Now Playing: Janet Jackson - Damito Jo
Topic: Writing Outings
21July06 Friday 7:02pm
A.S. Byatt
- We need stories because of time.
- Age shapes your sense of time
- "Can't you remember there's a war on?"
- all stories are about time
- suppose you didn't know a character is going to die.
Virginie Despentes
34 years old - occasional prostitute
- the secret is not to hesitate
- porn as a character. What is pornography?
- the word "sex worker" doesn't exist in French
- they don't want to pay for what has happened
- men that want what women don't want to give.
Tama Janowitz
as far as I know no one has ever died of celibacy
Barbara Trapido
- I never promise my characters happiness
- I write like an outsider
- went on holiday and wrote a kaleidoscope of stories
- you are allowed to write about that place because it's over
- mother was the storyteller in her family
- most mild mannered man at work but a tyrant at home
- Her father got out of Holland by luck just before the occupation
- hate the sin not the sinner
Frances Itani
Language was loud and silent
Mary Woronov
- believes that television is our death
- boredom is good
- a love story between two people where it's impossible
- characters are betrayed by people close to them
- you build characters and then you betray them and see how they react
- you have to have something bad happen in order to change or for something to be good
- evil is powerful
- what the world is doing to girls and their bodies
- put humor where things are blackest.
Patricia Duncker
- it's a good idea to publish what you like not all that you write
- writing as a response to reading
- short fiction written to solve a problem in long fiction
- characters who are marginal to society - misanthropic loners
- on the edge of things
- good is unitary, evil has more variety
- fiction is about emotion, passion, change
- horror - the deposit box for our anxieties and concerns
- stalker movies - complicity between stalker and victim. He's at home, he's waiting for you - it's about domestic assault.
- looming men stepping out of the shadows
- how cliches are built up, how they operate and what they actually mean.
- give the pleasures of the genre and a little edge, a shift
- need a driving passion underneath it.
- what is perceived as normal
- Fiction -
1 - exceptional people in ordinary circumstances
2 - ordinary people in exceptional circumstances
3 - exceptional people in exceptional circumstances
- being a critical reader of your own work
- Why write if you're not a reader.
- the triangulation - writer, reader and text
Jennifer Johnston
- father kept files on each child
- started writing at 35
- leave my footprints on the earth
- writing - it's always the first time
- writing about my tribe
- saying what you really want to say
- how you react to people you love
- the secrecy and mystery of men
- you've got to get away from your family to see them properly
- the cost of not being able to be yourself
- advice - make a routine - don't wait for inspiration - sit down and concentrate - read, read, read - don't show it to your friends - it has to be finished.
Khaled Hosseini
- betrayal, redemption, the consequences of betrayal
- stepping out of the shadow that your past casts on your life
- redemption requires some suffering
- you suffer if no one cares in what you have to say
- an entire generation born in war, have lived in war
- eating is a unifying activity
- people who are displaced and leaving every thing behind
- survivor's guilt
Orly Castel-Bloom
- in order to survive you must be a bad enough mother
- no sense of space, just check points
- between books there is emptiness
Sandro Verenesi
- death of a father doesn't mean that a son wins
- when you're understanding of the world collapses
- if pages in my book surprise the reader it's because it surprises me. I don't know where I'm going.
- your senses deny what your mind tells you
- writing is a matter of faith
- playing with the differences of you - characters who have qualities not like you
- I don't write to recover from my suffering. I recover from my suffering so I can write.
Dan Rhodes
- takes his cue from songwriters
- nailing a mood in 2 verses and a chorus
- "anthropology" - each story is 101 words long. 101 stories.
- wrote a story a day as a goal
- "don't tell me the truth about love"
Julie Zeh
- wars financed by drugs
- the bad things attract attention
Syl Cheney-Coker
- killing done by kids - the majority of the killing was done by kids
- dealing with duality
- the parliament of writers. cities of asylum were created mostly in Europe and Las Vegas (!)
- exile - carries weight of history
- immigrant - destroys any history - "I don't want to go back there."
- a writer is always an outsider
David Guterson
- questions of the human conditions
- landscape as a thematic force
- do no harm
- feeling that he knows less than he did in the past
- Who I am now
- What do you have to write?
- the cheapening of religious phenomenon
- wherever a crowd gathers people will try to monopolize on that and sell things
- setting as characters
- creating a continuous dream, immerse the reader in a powerful dream of which they cannot awake.
- questions of the spirit.
- when he writes he goes from sleep to work
- doesn't want this world to get into the psyche
- writes in a linear form - never more than 500 new words each day
- writes 6 days a week
- what excites you artistically?
- a feminine component of the divine
- introspection - your own disturbances
Louise Welsh
- in Britain it's okay to be a gay man as long as you're funny.
- literary transvestitism
- a writer's job is to make things up
- we're all flawed personalities
Helen Dunmore
- sense of waiting and asking to be written
- the past is never over
- a child's immediate reaction to a parents violence against his mother
Caryl Phillips
- who has the most insistent voice?
- takes on tribalism
- the things people try to do to cross national borders
- the global wanderer
- people with no children and the impact of having no survivors
- imagining a person who is not you with a degree of sensitivity
- you can't tell a writer what to do, what to write, what they cannot write about...
Douglas Coupland
don't do much but make sure everyone knows you've done it.
EY
