If you look at communal experiments in general for any amount of time, you'll find a lot of horrors: raped children, sexual slavery, eugenics experiments, on and on. Lauren Groff More Quotes by Lauren Groff More Quotes From Lauren Groff Research is about following the gleam into the dark. It's also about being sensitive enough to know which fact is "the creative fact; the fertile fact; the fact that suggests and engenders," as opposed to the fact that deadens and kills a delicate new project. Lauren Groff creative research dark It seems to me that if you were to take almost any half-century in history, you'd find a grand societal tug-of-war between the community and the individual. Lauren Groff community half war As with most of my work, I started from the abstract, from research, building an intellectual model that slowly became internalized when the characters came alive. It's fascinating what happens to the model you've so assiduously assembled when characters are allowed to run rampant: things you thought essential are broken and other things are vastly improved. Lauren Groff broken running character Everything is cyclical. Historical eras go through times of intense cynicism, broken by periods of intense idealism. Lauren Groff eras historical broken I think that writers have natural canvases, and my canvas, even in short stories, often seems to be the scope of a life. Lauren Groff canvas stories thinking When I write new worlds, I work in layers, building and throwing out, and building anew. Lauren Groff layers writing world It's not easy to make friends when you're an adult writer outside of academia, especially when you work alone in a little room for twelve hours a day, and so I wrote toward what I most longed for. Lauren Groff academia twelve adults I love writing from enclosed spaces: you really learn about your characters when they have tight walls to push against. Lauren Groff wall writing character Writing is the lonely sport of sad sacks. Lauren Groff lonely writing sports A lot of my work comes from a place of despair or fear. I often write in order to gain some sort of control over aspects of my life or the world that seem too dark to look at directly. Lauren Groff dark writing order You had to pick up a landline to make sure your best friend wore a matching outfit to school. I do remember people talking more. Nostalgia is dangerous, though. Lauren Groff talking people school There is part of me that longs to have the back-to-the-earth life - make my own bread, grow my own wheat, just be really self-sufficient - but I am not, at the moment, willing to give up the luxury of modern life, and amazing schools for my kids, and things that I've come to rely on that are parts of society. Lauren Groff giving-up kids school I see ghosts everywhere, and that is partially a function of my being incredibly near-sighted and reading way too late into the night. Lauren Groff reading too-late night I've never wanted to chuck my mortgage, drop the kids off at their grandparents' and run gloriously naked in fields of flax. Lauren Groff grandparent running kids I try not to think too much or be too impatient, and let the back of my brain do its mysterious work. Lauren Groff brain trying thinking I love Twitter. It's like having a closet full of clever friends that you can visit twice a day, then shove back into the darkness when you're tired of them. Lauren Groff tired darkness clever It's wonderful that nothing you write is ever going to be as beautiful as what's in your head, because that gap is where the art can enter and begin to stretch its limbs. Lauren Groff writing beautiful art The triumph of writing fiction is that by doing so, writers can build a more ideal world in themselves. Lauren Groff triumph writing fiction We need the skeletons of other stories to understand our own, sometimes. Lauren Groff skeletons stories needs Fiction is always a utopian task, in that there's an ideal you hold in your head as you write which inevitably fails in the moment of creation, in the insufficiency of words to convey meaning, or in the way the work is completed in the reader's head. Lauren Groff tasks writing fiction
