I believe novels can have secrets from their author, a notion I i... by Steve Erickson

I believe novels can have secrets from their author, a notion I imagine would appall Nabokov.

Steve Erickson

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Categorized in : Believe Secret Imagine

While I do believe I become a technically better writer over time, in others ways writing gets harder because inspiration is finite.

inspiration writing believe

Though energy and inspiration diminish, experience grows - the theme of parents and kids, for instance.

parent inspiration kids

The material dictates the approach. I tell the stories in the way that feels natural to tell them. Certainly the last thing I want is to be "difficult."

stories want way

To me experimental fiction ultimately is about the experiment and I'm not interested in experiments for their own sake.

not-interested sake fiction

I think most novelists I know, certainly including me, feel the novels choose them rather than vice-versa.

novelists vices thinking

I write almost purely by instinct. I've never made an outline. by Steve Erickson

I write almost purely by instinct. I've never made an outline.

instinct made writing

Before I begin a novel I have a strong sense of at least one central character and how the story begins, and a more vague sense of where things may wind up, but at some point, if the novel is any good at all, the story and characters take on lives of their own and take over the book, and the writer has to be open to that.

strong character book

I'm my own "ideal reader" in the sense that I write novels that I... by Steve Erickson

I'm my own "ideal reader" in the sense that I write novels that I would want to read.

novel want writing

If Marxist theory dictates that the personal is always political, the rebuttal of both 'The Americans' and 'House of Cards' is that the political is always personal: the sum total of our collective needs and desires, vows and betrayals.

always political house cards

Memory runs by its own itinerary, departing and arriving at stations of the past on its own schedule.

schedule own memory past

For half a century, the Sunset Strip was the asphalt timeline of American popular music. My most distinct memory, from more years ago than I'll confess to, is waiting for a table at the Olde World, which occupied a wedge of territory at Sunset and Holloway Drive, where the daiquiris became more vicious the longer you sat in the sun.

you sunset music waiting

The beautifully composed imagery of '12 Years a Slave' underscores the savagery of its subject, which is an American South not of knights and ladies but obscene values and a grotesque pageantry, every gorgeous shot of the languid landscape radiating toxicity like a hyperlush blossom that's poison to the touch.

blossom like landscape values

In their matching candy-stripe shirts, the Beach Boys were America's biggest band of the early '60s, transmitting utopian bulletins of summer without end to a cold and overcast nation.

nation end cold beach

Struggling to end the war and to eliminate slavery once and for all by way of the 13th Amendment, with the amendment's prospective passage undermining the effort to make peace with the Confederacy and vice versa, Lincoln embodied the Great Man theory that leftists disdain.

great man war peace

Before movies, memory unspooled differently in the mind, trailing off in dust-blasted fade-out rather than spliced-together flashback; before photography, memory rippled like a reflection on water's surface, less precise but more profoundly true.

memory reflection mind water

Among the gorges and ravines that hang on Los Angeles's shoulders like a necklace, Topanga - nestled in the cleavage of the Santa Monica Mountains - is the most singular of ornaments.

mountains like shoulders santa

'The Company You Keep' is about outgrowing not just the delusions that accompany youth but the harsh certainties driving our lives and then trapping them before the years outpace the velocity of our dreams.

dreams you driving youth

Italian writer-director Paolo Sorrentino makes zombie movies, which probably comes as a surprise to him. At the center of his best and most recent pictures are the walking dead, characters in a race with themselves across mortality's finish line, their spirits arriving before the rest of them.

pictures rest best walking

Besides inquiries as to our general well-being, the first thing asked about us, in our first seconds of being alive, is whether we're a boy or girl. Our first passport through this world is our genitals.

boy alive girl world

The most telling thing about 'Fargo,' both the now-classic movie and the television series, is that it doesn't take place in Fargo.

telling about place television