Every once in a while someone says, 'You can't really learn anything, if you're really a writer then you wouldn't need to do it.' But I think what people need is the sense of not being alone. They go to MFA programs to be part of a community of people who care, and then you start caring about your friend who is trying to edit a magazine and your other friend who is stuck in the middle of her poem. There you have all kinds of things to worry about besides your own success.

Alice Mattison

Categorized in : Thinking People Caring

It's a scary thing for fiction writers, when you're always writing from the point of view both as and for someone who is different.

Alice Mattison

scary views writing

We're always inventing, even if we're making someone who's fairly close to ourselves.

Alice Mattison

inventing ifs

If you have a character stand up and put on her shoes and open the door, in order to do that, you're imagining her shoes and her clothes and her house and her door. The character becomes more real. But once you've done that, you can probably just get it all across with a couple of details.

Alice Mattison

couple real character

I've been astonished how often, when I convince a writer to tell a story more straightforwardly and to tell it more simply and directly, it turns out that this author is great and the story is wonderful.

Alice Mattison

turns stories wonderful

Sometimes indirect style and varying chronology is great, but quite often I've seen it be just something that gets in the way. It turns out when I talk to the writer that she or he, and more often it's a woman, that she's worried.

Alice Mattison

style sometimes way

I began to see, again and again, stories that were first confusing and second where the emotional impact was muted because the big scene came before the explanation of what was going on. There was a reverse chronological order as well as a concealment of what exactly was going on. I think often that comes out of the fear of being boring, and sometimes I think it's just an attempt to seem clever.

Alice Mattison

emotional clever thinking

When an editor first explained to me the difference between direct and indirect writing, I just thought it was a stylistic choice.

Alice Mattison

editors differences writing

The making of fiction takes literally what is suggested by our imagination.

Alice Mattison

imagination fiction

I don't have the courage not to write all the time.

Alice Mattison

writing

Somehow we have to detach from feeling as though money is a quick and easy standard by which we can gauge how well we're doing.

Alice Mattison

gauges easy feelings

Writers sometimes are paid a great deal of money, but much more frequently they're not paid or are paid only a little bit.

Alice Mattison

deals littles sometimes

Inevitably we start by thinking that if our work is any good, we'll get money. It's as we would if you started up a business or if you work in another profession.

Alice Mattison

profession get-money thinking

It's hard to say which of us is luckier, the ones who go through long periods when they can't write or the ones who can write pretty easily.

Alice Mattison

periods writing long

Maybe we're stuck with who we are.

Alice Mattison

stuck who-we-are

In many cultures, women are sometimes literally kept from learning to read or from going to school.

Alice Mattison

sometimes culture school

We still have so many cultures in which people are imprisoned and whipped and killed for writing what they think.

Alice Mattison

writing people thinking

Censorship is all around us, I don't think it's innate.

Alice Mattison

innate censorship thinking

Truly things are better in general now, in America, than in the past.

Alice Mattison

america past

Certainly children are being encouraged far more than they were seventy-five years ago and are more accepted as they are.

Alice Mattison

accepted children years

This is true in other fields, too, that a legal aid lawyer gets a whole lot less money than a Hollywood lawyer who handles the estates of celebrities. Maybe the legal aid lawyer is doing something better, though, and maybe they're happier. It's not a completely unheard of idea, but I do think we have to remind ourselves at times to look for satisfaction in other ways.

Alice Mattison

hollywood ideas thinking