The first seven years that I wrote fiction, I sent out stories and a novel and made a total of $25. Jess Walter More Quotes by Jess Walter More Quotes From Jess Walter My desk is an antique with bookshelves built into the side. I've turned the drawer over to hold a keyboard. We live in a 100-year-old house, and I work in an apartment above the carriage house. Jess Walter livesidehousework My writing regimen is not very regimented. I tend to be a binge writer, working sometimes in the morning and sometimes all night. When I get going I like to hunch over the keyboard until I feel totally played out. Jess Walter feelmorningsometimesnight My cure for writer's block is to step away from the thing I'm stuck on, usually a novel, and write something totally different. Besides fiction, I write poetry, screenplays, essays and journalism. It's usually not the writing itself that I'm stuck on, but thing I'm trying to write. So I often have four or five things going at once. Jess Walter stepjournalismpoetrywriting I tend to like the last sentence I just wrote, which is: 'It was late in the fall and the trees lining our driveway had turned red like a row of burning matches.' Jess Walter treeslateredfall For me, movies and television are interesting because they are the dominant storytelling form of our time. My first love will always be fiction, and especially novels, but I'm a writer... I write poetry and essays and criticism and I'd love to write a whole play, and sometimes I even write scripts. Jess Walter mepoetrytimelove My first book, about Ruby Ridge, was made into a miniseries on CBS in 1996, and since then, I've dabbled in Hollywood, pitched a few things, sold a couple of screenplays and a pilot that I wrote with a buddy from Spokane, flirted with seeing 'Citizen Vince' as a film, and most recently, adapted 'The Financial Lives of the Poets' as a script. Jess Walter pilotthingsseeingbook People sometimes ask who I would cast in my books and I never have any idea. I don't think I could ever write a book thinking of it as a movie the whole time. This would be like building a house and filling it with furniture just so you could have blueprints. Jess Walter youtimepeoplethinking I've been simultaneously drawn to and repelled from Hollywood for years. Jess Walter repelledbeenhollywoodyears With Facebook and Twitter, we're all our own little publicists in a way. Jess Walter littlefacebookownway The war in Iraq, the abuse of detainees, electronic eavesdropping, Guantanamo Bay - these things were all done on our behalf and they may turn out in the end to have created more terrorists. Jess Walter endthingsdonewar I think celebrity has become almost normalized. I feel like we all live our lives in a pale imitation of celebrity. With Facebook, we choose a photo that is not too good a photo - we're more arch than that. We're our own celebrity publicists. We understand it so innately. Jess Walter feelgoodunderstandthink There are some people whose Twitter feeds are works of art. They intuitively understand how much of themselves to put out there. Jess Walter some-peopleunderstandpeopleart I remember the first time I went to Europe, I had someone take a picture of me there, so I could really see myself there. There's a sense of being outside yourself, and I think celebrity allows us that too, to be outside ourselves. Jess Walter yourselfmyselfmetime My poetry is the most disappointing thing for me that I've ever written. When I say I can write everything, I don't say I can write everything well. Jess Walter saymei-canpoetry I cling to the idea that Herman Melville had to work at the end of his career watching ships in a dock, as a shipping agent in New York. Any writer who thinks they should be given patronage because of their gift... you don't have to look too far in history to see that's just not the case. Jess Walter giftyouworkhistory
