Reading with a view to editing is different too from reading for pleasure. There is a responsibility attached to it: the responsibility to attempt to be less partial than you might otherwise be. You are not, for instance, furnishing your own home.
One thing you soon surmise from reading Raymond Carver is that he was an alcoholic. Carver’s characters tend to drink excessively, and his stories often examine the negative impact of drinking on his central character’s relationships. But for the last eleven years of his life, Carver was sober, and it was in these sober years that he wrote what many believe to be his finest stories.
Katherine Orr admits… I have always felt frustrated by the stock advice to the young writer: write what you know.
The significant package in prose fiction, and especially in the short story I suspect, is the paragraph. Stephen King suggests this in his On Writing. Groups of paragraph packages are often separated by a line space.
An extended version of Adam’s interview has now been filed under the tab Q&A tab at the top of the page.
I am three months into my MA and I find myself experimenting with ways in which my critical research can set up little fires under my creative practice, so that my creative juices (or impulses) don’t cool, congeal and sit in a fatty layer around the edges of my brain.
‘I’m obviously thrilled and surprised and almost stupefied that this little book made it through everything to get on the Giller List,’ explains Alexander MacLeod by email…
Murakami’s parents were strict, but allowed him freedom to go hiking and explore his environment. He was permitted to buy books on credit at the local bookstore, so long as they never included magazines or comics. He began to write for his school paper and fell in love with American detective novels…
According to AS Byatt, ‘A good short story is always working towards its end.’ A comment I kept in mind when re-reading the stories of Anne Enright.
