Ben Dolnick: A novel quite possibly won't be good and, even more possi...

Sometimes I think there ought to be a coat of arms for all of us who listen to Oberst's band Bright Eyes past the age of twenty-six. 'With Love and Shame,' the motto would read. The handwriting would be the cramped and tortured scribble of a high school freshman.

Ben Dolnick

eyes age love past

True atonement isn't the periodic shaving of karmic stubble via confessional; it requires deep, truthful change. It means doing the hardest thing of all: not making the same stupid mistake again.

Ben Dolnick

deep change stupid mistake

In life, we like tranquility; in books, we love tension.

Ben Dolnick

like tension love life

In the Children's Zoo, Enrichment meant presenting the goats with a trash can smeared with peanut butter or dangling keys at the end of a broomstick in front of the cow. The goats would knock their heads around the inside of the can and emerge giddy, peanut butter drunk.

Ben Dolnick

cow end drunk children

For a long time, since story collections look almost precisely like novels, I presumed that they were meant to be enjoyed in the same way as novels.

Ben Dolnick

look long-time time long

A novel is no mere assemblage of gears; it is a wild and living being. And how are you to discern the intentions of a creature - to discover its true nature - other than by close and respectful observation?

Ben Dolnick

wild true you nature

The patron saint of outlining - the bespectacled siren who sings to me from his spotless rock - is P. G. Wodehouse.

Ben Dolnick

rock his who me

For me, novel-writing, by its nature, contains months of feeling lost, gloomy, fatally misguided. The challenge has always been in assuring myself that by setting one foot in front of the other, I will eventually make my way out of the desert.

Ben Dolnick

challenge myself me nature

When I started researching the eco effects of eating meat, I'd assumed, for no good reason, that environmental irresponsibility would correspond to both animal size and deliciousness: Eating cows would be worst, eating pigs would be a bit less bad, and eating chickens would be basically harmless.

Ben Dolnick

good environmental eating animal

Literary interviews are inevitably packed with the nuts and bolts of how writers do their work, and there's very little that aspiring writers do more readily than fling other people's nuts and bolts into their toolboxes.

Ben Dolnick

more how work people

Of course I knew that writing was terrifically hard work and that there was no secret code, as in a video game, that would unlock Tolstoy-mode, enabling me to crank out canon-worthy novellas before lunch.

Ben Dolnick

game me hard-work work

I've sold all but one of my microphones, put away my mini-notebooks, stopped scouring the Internet for scraps of wisdom.

Ben Dolnick

put away internet wisdom

Writing is a sufficiently lonely and mysterious pastime that I don't begrudge myself a talisman or two, so long as they don't become ways of distracting myself from the glum inescapability of actual work.

Ben Dolnick

myself work writing long

Beginning in middle school, the era of wide-margined, Bible-paged anthologies, short stories develop unpromising associations - and these associations often linger through college, when stories become the things distributed in Xeroxes missing entire pages of line-endings.

Ben Dolnick

short beginning college school

A short-story collection is harder to formulate pithy sentences about.

Ben Dolnick

collection about harder sentences

A social worker named Cosette Rae, along with a therapist named Hilarie Cash, founded 'ReSTART' in what, until then, had been Rae's house.

Ben Dolnick

therapist then social house

I know very well that to admit to loving Bright Eyes is to admit to having an overgrown brain region devoted to self-pity, sentimentality, regret, and a handful of other not very appealing emotional states.

Ben Dolnick

loving eyes regret brain

I would love to love Saul Bellow, but by page fifty of 'Herzog', something within me has wandered into another room.

Ben Dolnick

room something me love

Oberst is one of those musicians that some people hate in a visceral, biological way.

Ben Dolnick

some-people hate people way

If you were placing bets on which author would write the tenderest, most moving book about fatherhood, Philip Roth would probably come in at the bottom of the list.

Ben Dolnick

write you book moving

A novel quite possibly won't be good and, even more possibly, will have not-good parts, but at least it won't shape-shift on you; at least you can say that you're halfway through and know that this maps onto some clear, visualizable chunk of narrative.