Antonya Nelson: Writing is a completely private act. It's in a way lik...

There are a thousand things to hear about, informationally, daily, but the thing that doesn't go away is the one to pay attention to.

Antonya Nelson

going-away pay attention

Fiction ought to announce the problems, dramatize the problems, display them. Yet offer no set answer. An answer would solve the mystery. Writing fiction, for me, is about putting on paper my obsessive interest in something mysterious. I may figure out the source of the mystery, the things that brought some action or image to my mind, but to make an equation of it would ruin the story.

Antonya Nelson

mind writing may

You own a dog with the knowledge that it will move through the stages of existence in fast forward, providing you with a lesson about your own life passages if you let it.

Antonya Nelson

dog life moving

Readers will share in the environs of the author and her characters, be taken into the hardship of a pitiless place and emerge on the other side — wiser, warier and weathered like the landscape.

Antonya Nelson

hardship taken character

Is not Justice just a nice way to say revenge.

Antonya Nelson

nice revenge justice

Birdy never felt artistic inclination when armed with a marking implement. What came to her were words, always words, commentary and criticism and correction and simple vocabulary curios; she scratched a few of them on the smooth red wall.

Antonya Nelson

wall vocabulary simple

If the book is finished—published and on the shelf—I do not think of revising it. But if I'm not finished psychologically with characters, they will recur, either as themselves or as new, slightly altered manifestations, and their same issues will reappear. It's a matter of the subject and emotional investment and my own obsessive thinking about various issues It's an unconscious process. To say that a single story is not done isn't quite true. A story can be finished and judged successful or not by somebody else, but if the issue is not done for me, I can count on its reappearance.

Antonya Nelson

successful character book

Melissa Pritchard's prose, that darkly lyrical firmament, is brightened by the dizzy luminous arrangement of her stars and satellites, her great gifts to us: humor, irony, kindness, brilliance.

Antonya Nelson

dizzy stars kindness

The most enduring battle is between head and heart; what would be efficient and logical is nearly always trumped by what is messy and illogical.

Antonya Nelson

always messy battle heart

Most of what one feels compelled to write stems from a deep emotional uncertainty.

Antonya Nelson

deep write uncertainty emotional

I'm not entirely sure why I write about family, but I do know that it hasn't stopped interesting me. You meet and leave other people at different stages of your evolution, whereas family is made up of people who are constant links in your life, who know you over the course of time and have your complete curriculum vitae in their heads.

Antonya Nelson

me family time life

Empathy is not as complicated when you have some aspects in common with your character; it's not impossible to know someone who's like you in many ways but different in one. This is true especially if you are a reader. Reading makes you accustomed to inhabiting other lives and sensibilities.

Antonya Nelson

you empathy impossible character

I think about and study people. I think I make people uneasy sometimes by being so curious as to why they do what they do. I find myself thinking about this fairly obsessively, and I can't stop until I've found an answer.

Antonya Nelson

myself sometimes people thinking

I grew up with parents who were English professors at Wichita State University, and we were more liberal-minded as a family than most of the people I hung out with in Wichita. During summers, we went off to Telluride, Colorado, where I've returned every summer since I was born.

Antonya Nelson

parents born family people

My father was among the first of his generation to look into writers who've become part of the American lit. canon. When he wrote his master's thesis on William Faulkner in the Forties, he couldn't find anybody on the faculty at Columbia University to oversee it because they didn't read Faulkner.

Antonya Nelson

generation look university father

I have three brothers and one sister, and I'm the third child. Sometimes people say, 'It's only natural you would become a writer - your parents were English professors.' But my four siblings were brought up in the exact same household, and no one else became a writer or an English professor.

Antonya Nelson

parents you sister people

I definitely don't think of myself as someone identified by region. It's too far-flung a region, for starters, and southern New Mexico is very isolated. I wouldn't think of my identity as generational, either, but maybe as more stylistic, in the school of realism and domestic issues.

Antonya Nelson

myself think identity school

I like the way that psychological extremity can illuminate more 'normal' characters by forcing a comparison.

Antonya Nelson

forcing more like way

Teenagers, especially girl ones, seem like the perfect canary-in-the-coal-mine characters to me. They capture American culture and its perversion, its hypocrisy - how absorbed we are with youth and beauty and sexualized imagery, for instance, while preaching abstinence and modesty.

Antonya Nelson

me girl beauty culture

I think maybe short stories operate in some of the same ways that poems do. They frame single or small moments and elevate those. They give you insight into more minor dramas maybe, dramas between smaller groups of people.

Antonya Nelson

think you moments people

Writing is a completely private act. It's in a way like play but very serious play, and sometimes I can escape into the fictional world that I'm creating so fully as to see hours go by without my noticing it. I think that kind of suspension of time and that mindfulness is a real gift.