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Quote by Lidia Yuknavitch

“Most of my formal choices are a combination of everything I learned about form - semiotics, linguistics, and the history of style experimentations tethered to literary movements (formalism, deconstruction, modernism, and postmodernism), and the basic principal of breaking every rule I ever learned from a patriarchal writing tradition that never included my body or experience, and thus has nothing to offer me in terms of representation.”

Quote by Lidia Yuknavitch

Author

Lidia Yuknavitch

Lidia Yuknavitch is an American author born in 1963. Her works are known for their profound emotional depth and unique narrative style, exploring themes of identity, gender, and human experience. more

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“I work from the body - I try to develop a language of the body. I've invented a term I call "corporeal writing" around that idea. I love teaching and collaborating around this idea, because no new breakthrough in literature ever happened because everyone was doing what was already there.”

Writing Trying Ideas Body Literature Language Term Happened Teaching Breakthrough Collaborating Love Teaching

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“I don't have much interest in writing if there are not opportunities to crack open the inherited forms. The writing I love to read most does this as well. I'm a form junkie.”

Ifs Writing Wells Doe Form Opportunity Interest Cracks Junkie Love To Read

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“One path I've used a lot is to deeply and thoughtfully consider a trope or a tradition, and then set about taking it apart - but only in the service of a character or story that deserves it. Another path I often employ is to put form into "play" - to set it free from its ordinary constraints and let it be free-floating and broken-apart and rearranged.”

Play Character Stories Form Used Path Broken Ordinary Deserve Tradition Floating Constraints Tropes

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“To be honest, we live in an exciting time where form is concerned. My sincerest hope is that more people will notice this and agree to play and invent - the only way to not succumb to the complacency and market-driven schlock of the present tense is to continually interrogate it from the inside out.”

People Way Play Form Honest Concerned Exciting Agree Driven Being Honest Tense Complacency Present Tense

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“I started writing when I was a journalist. But every time I sat down to write a novel or a story, I ended up writing about myself, which was incredibly annoying and self-involved.”

Writing Self Stories Novel Involved Journalist Sat Annoying

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“Memory implies that there is some static time and place you can go back to, whereas if you relive it by trying to put yourself back in that context, its more nuanced, less black and white. More traumatic, but also more exciting. When I knew I had to write about things that would be painful, I put off doing it for ages. But then eventually the fear of not doing it becomes greater than the fear of doing it.”

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“The hardest bits of my book to read were the easiest bits to write because they were the most immediate. Probably because I had never stopped thinking about them on some level. Those bits I was just channelling and those were the most exciting writing days. The bits I found harder were the bits that happen in between, you know, the rest of living. There were whole years, whole houses, that I just got rid of.”

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“The stories we tell ourselves about ourselves are very often not really what happened. And as I started to write stuff down, I started to challenge what I thought I knew about myself, my culture, my family, all of it. It was a huge, destroying process that completely took over my life. I just wasn't here, I mean I was physically present, but I wasn't here, I was back in the 1980s.”

Writing Mean Stories Culture Stuff Process Challenges Happened Huge My Family Destroying

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“You don't realise how much you're holding onto until you start to let go of it. I had had loads of therapy and thought I had come to terms with who I am, but there's something in the process of writing that unlocks other experiences, other emotions and you have to be prepared for that.”

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“Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith.”