I write a ridiculous number of drafts. The characters change and grow through the drafting, and my understanding of them deepens. Creating characters in a novel is like shooting at clay pigeons and missing, and then missing more productively as the narrative continues.

Robert Boswell

Categorized in : Grow Missing Change Understanding

What was your life anyway but the tiny black spot of what you've done against the infinite white of possibility?

black done white

Every sane person has to find every day some manner of accommodating the impossible, some way of covering up for the failures of the rational world. This might actually be a reasonable definition of sanity.

covering definitions world

Every man has a day in his life when nobody can defeat him. by Robert Boswell

Every man has a day in his life when nobody can defeat him.

every-man defeat men

Writing is such a solitary thing, so its nice, when Im discouraged, to see people still have such faith in fiction.

nice writing people

Characters are often revealed by the ways they misapprehend other... by Robert Boswell

Characters are often revealed by the ways they misapprehend others.

character way

Elizabeth Searle writes with intelligence, passion and wit. She's one of the best young writers around.

young-writers passion writing

You have to avoid caricature, at the one end of the spectrum, and sentimentality, at the other; which is not to say that such characters shouldn't be funny part of the time, or that their actions shouldn't evoke genuine feeling.

feeling you time funny

We lived on a farm outside a town of about 900 people. My father was the principal of the elementary school. It was a typical Southern town - there are a lot of churches, and it's dry.

principal father people school

I guess I'm struck all the time by how outrageously wrong life is. There are times I can't stand to read the newspapers. It makes me insane.

stand me time life

I guess if life were fair, people who led decent lives would be rewarded, and people who led indecent lives would not be rewarded.

fair who life people