The struggle is how to write optimistically when the world we're living in is not inherently optimistic. I love the idea of the family from the most Norman Rockwell version to Norman Bates. Without family, we have very little - it is the most basic social structure. So yes I suppose I wanted to write a hopeful book about the evolution of the family.

A.M. Homes

Categorized in : Book Writing Struggle

If you don’t write the book you have to write, everything breaks. by A.M. Homes

If you don’t write the book you have to write, everything breaks.

break writing book

Books tell you more about their owners than the owners do. by A.M. Homes

Books tell you more about their owners than the owners do.

owners book

I once jokingly told someone that every book is like a relationship. They're four or five years long - that's not so bad. They're serious. They demand a lot of attention. But I remember thinking that I wanted to have one with someone who's not so crazy and peculiar and demanding.

crazy book thinking

I really don't watch enough TV to know about the impact. In my experience as a TV writer, I would say is the exact opposite - it's very constricted, all having to conform to a form. My sense of fiction writing is not to think about rules but to be driven by the characters and their stories. I often ask myself what's at risk here, who needs what, and how are they going to get it. There has to be a reason for the reader to stop living their own life and start reading your book.

reading writing book

I think fiction can help us find everything. You know, I think that in fiction you can say things and in a way be truer than you can be in real life and truer than you can be in non-fiction. There's an accuracy to fiction that people don't really talk about - an emotional accuracy.

emotional real thinking

Birthday parties make me nervous as hell. They're one of those things where you're forced to be happy. And even if you're totally depressed, you're got to pretend you're glad you were born, regardless of the fact that getting older means you're closer to dying.

getting-older party mean

I'm very interested in compassion - compassion for oneself and others. I write about very complicated characters and experiences and try to do it without judging the character or the action.

compassion writing character

People should pay more attention. Everyone wants attention, but n... by A.M. Homes

People should pay more attention. Everyone wants attention, but no one wants to give attention.

attention giving people

It's my policy not to review funerals. by A.M. Homes

It's my policy not to review funerals.

reviews policy funeral

Sometimes you can do things for others that you can't do for your... by A.M. Homes

Sometimes you can do things for others that you can't do for yourself.

can-do sometimes

You really can't write well if you're thinking about what the rev... by A.M. Homes

You really can't write well if you're thinking about what the reviewers might say.

writing thinking

Every family has a story that it tells itself, that it passes on to the children and grandchildren. The story grows over the years, mutates, some parts are sharpened, others dropped, and there is often debate about what really happened. But even with these different sides of the same story, there is still agreement that this is the family story. And in the absence of other narratives, it becomes the flagpole that the family hangs its identity from.

family agreement children

I'm nothing you can catch now. I am black powder, I am singe, I a... by A.M. Homes

I'm nothing you can catch now. I am black powder, I am singe, I am the bomb that bursts the night.

bombs black night

I'm feeling how profoundly my family disappointed me and in the end how I retreated, how I became nothing, because that was much less risky than attempting to be something, to be anything in the face of such contempt.

my-family faces feelings

What draws me to family... if I were a psychiatrist, I'd say an enormous amount of unresolved personal material. If I were an anthropologist, I'd say families are at the root of social structures - they shape our identity, our belief systems - and so I find them fascinating. Also, I love the idea that families have narratives that are essentially the family story that is passed along generation to generation - and the rifts start when people question the story.

belief identity people

The weird thing about having your birthday on a school day is that by the time you get to be ten, or eleven for sure, no one at school knows it's your birthday anymore. It's not like when you're little and your mom brings cupcakes for the whole class. But even though no one knows, you walk around like it's supposed to be a national holiday. You walk around thinking that people are supposed to be nice to you, like maybe on your birthday you're ten times more breakable than on any other day. Well, it doesn't work that way. It just doesn't.

nice mom school

Was this the big one or was this the small tremor, the warning? Does it get better - does the sensation of being in a dream underwater go away?

get-better going-away dream

My mind leaps to my theory about presidents - that there are two kinds, ones who have a lot of sex and the others who start wars. In short - and don't quote me, because this is an incomplete expression of a more complex premise - I believe blow jobs prevent war.

jobs war sex

I'd say our ability to supersize emotions are American-made special effects. In European countries, people mostly stay close to home and whatever rage there is simmers under the surface - it's what made the plays of Shakespeare and Harold Pinter so good.

home country people

I think about how truly interesting and odd it is that when a woman marries, traditionally she loses her name, becoming absorbed by the husband's family name - she is in effect lost, evaporated from all records under her maiden name. I finally understand the anger behind feminism - the idea that as a woman you are property to be conveyed between your father and your husband, but never an individual who exists independently. And on the flip side, it is also one of the few ways one can legitimately get lost - no one questions it.

husband father thinking