“We all have love stories that go terribly wrong; we all have horribly broken hearts. And somehow we endure. We're not destroyed by it. We endure and go on to do interesting things and have worthy lives, even though we carry our heartbreaks with us. That's a kind of personal story of mine that I don't think I would tell in memoir but I do think I can tell in fiction.” ThinkingHeartKindI CanStoriesInterestingFictionMinesBrokenGoes OnEndureWorthyLove StoryMemoirDestroyedInteresting ThingsPersonal Stories Author:Elizabeth Gilbert
“For example, when I was writing Leviathan, which was written both in New York and in Vermont - I think there were two summers in Vermont, in that house I wrote about in Winter Journal, that broken-down house... I was working in an out-building, a kind of shack, a tumble-down, broken-down mess of a place, and I had a green table. I just thought, "Well, is there a way to bring my life into the fiction I'm writing, will it make a difference?" And the fact is, it doesn't make any difference. It was a kind of experiment which couldn't fail.” ThinkingWayWritingWellsKindTwoFactsHouseDifferencesFictionFailingWrittenNew YorkExampleBuildingBrokenSummerTablesGreenWinterExperimentsMessMaking A DifferenceJournalBroken DownVermontShackLeviathan Author:Paul Auster
“The difference between fiction and journalism is that you can disguise the characters, so you won't get your legs broken, and there's no interview tapes to transcribe.” CharacterDifferencesFictionBrokenLegsJournalismInterviewsTapeDisguise Author:Sylvie Simmons
“A lot of people who want to see the short story have a renaissance of readership - they tend to think of short stories, and sometimes poems too, as being well-suited to the way we now live, with all of these broken-up bits of time. I hope they're right, but my sense is that our fiction reading has become, if anything, more cherished as a kind of escape from fragmentation.” PeopleIfsThinkingWayWantWellsKindSometimesStoriesReadingBitsFictionBrokenShort StoryRenaissanceBroken UpReadershipFragmentation Author:Lorin Stein