It's my experience that people don't think of fiction writing as being as intellectually serious as other kinds of writing in academia and so without a career as a critic or essayist you can be treated as something of a spiritual medium - a fraud - for "just" writing fiction.

Alexander Chee

Categorized in : Thinking Writing Spiritual

Every now and then, you find a book that feels like it was keyed to your DNA.

Alexander Chee

now-and-then dna book

PhD, MFA, self-taught - the only things you must have to become a writer are the stamina to continue and a wily, cagey heart in the face of extremity, failure, and success.

Alexander Chee

self faces heart

Writers aren't born, they're made - from practice, reading, and a lot of caffeine.

Alexander Chee

reading practice writing

The idea of a talent that was bigger than an artist's ability to choose to use it, that would dictate the artist's life more than the artist could dictate, was interesting to me.

Alexander Chee

artist ideas interesting

Throughout my reading life, I've enjoyed many memorable meals-if only fictionally. The oysters at dinner near the beginning of Anna Karenina, the dinner Nana throws for her overflowing guests in Zola's Nana, the walk through Les Halles for breakfast in Baldwin's Giovanni's Room, and nearly every meal in Monique Truong's The Book of Salt.

Alexander Chee

reading memorable book

Whenever people say a coincidence in a novel is implausible, I think, Do I have a story for you.

Alexander Chee

stories people thinking

I have lived for a long time inside a series of coincidences that most people would find implausible in a novel.

Alexander Chee

coincidence long people

Everyone would tell me they couldn't identify with sexual abuse. No one says they can't identify with the tales of the Greek gods and goddesses because they don't live on Mt. Olympus.

Alexander Chee

abuse greek olympus

I was trying to make a novel about something no one wanted to read about into something they couldn't put down or look away from.

Alexander Chee

novel trying looks

The ideal editor will hold you to the best of yourself in the piece.

Alexander Chee

ideals editors pieces

Most written work is a conversation between the editor and the writer, that the writer essentially fulfills in public, and the editor provides the stage for that to happen as well as the prompts.

Alexander Chee

stage editors conversation

I realized that my identity as a novelist was private. Only I knew how much of a novelist I was!

Alexander Chee

i-realized novelists identity

I had a naiveté that I would remember the things that I had written already, but I was getting lost in the forest of my own ideas and having to find my way out.

Alexander Chee

getting-lost way ideas

My interest in women's voices started when I was in the boys' choir and we were singing in opera choruses. That was my first close-up experience with the female soprano voice. I was amazed at how it could be within the same scale but so different in quality.

Alexander Chee

singing voice boys

I've been told it's hard to write about singing. I didn't realize that going into it. I might not have tried if I knew!

Alexander Chee

singing writing might

As writer pay declined and teacher pay also, we all started hanging out online. You could say online social networks cheapen our friendships or you could say we were cheapened by a plutocratic power grab and this is all we can afford.

Alexander Chee

social-network pay teacher

The way some were entrapped into lives of prostitution, the way that something like marriage could rob them of their rights.

Alexander Chee

prostitution rights way

As I get ready to buy a new computer, I'm stunned at all the many micro drafts, of different chapters and scenes and whatnot, that litter the hard drive.

Alexander Chee

computer scene different

With my family background - my parents were both activists - writing about culture and politics came naturally.

Alexander Chee

parent writing culture

I grew up treating a life as a writer as a career in letters, one devoted to many kinds of writing. And so it seemed normal to study both fiction writing and the literary essay as an undergrad.

Alexander Chee

normal careers writing