Darin Strauss Quotes

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Darin Strauss

Profession : Writer

Birth : March 1, 1970

What makes writing a memoir difficult is harder to quantify. Is it learning to know when you're ready to talk about something? Is it seeing the structure in a lumpen mass of fact? Is it finding out what you were really like as other people saw you? Yes to each.

Darin Strauss

For the fiction students I teach, one of the most common mistakes is to start in the wrong place. Often the actual story doesn't begin until about a third of the way into their narratives. They start off instead with excessive scene-setting, metaphysical speculation, introducing nonessential dramatis personae, throat-clearing, etc.

Darin Strauss

Write what you think is good, is the whole of the law.

Darin Strauss

When you write fiction, you have an ideal reader in your mind who's sort of you but smarter.

Darin Strauss

The novelist has permission to do whatever she chooses to supercharge whatever's interesting in her story. This is also known as freedom.

Darin Strauss

A tragedy's first act is crowded with supporting players, policeman scribbling in pads and making radio calls, witnesses crimping their faces, EMS guys folding equipment.

Darin Strauss

In each scene, the writer sets up a situation, which brings a conflict as well as either a small victory or a loss at the close of that particular scene.

Darin Strauss

Characters stretching their legs in some calm haven generally don't make for interesting protagonists.

Darin Strauss

You can work really hard and well on something, and someone you respect might hate it; worse, they're not empirically wrong for doing so. This is scary, especially for people who haven't been published.

Darin Strauss

The main thing is to think strategically about what will engage your readers. Trust me when I tell you that few people are eager to read a story whose opening lines sound like a dissertation on giant bugs.

Darin Strauss

Regret doesn't budge things; it seems crazy that the force of all that human want can't amend a moment, can't even stir a pebble.

Darin Strauss

All writers have their own pet commandments.

Darin Strauss

Memoirs are - memory is - rarely 100 percent accurate. Any autobiography is a construct, ballpark, even unnatural. Private diaries, too, can be unreliable - a detail that matters only if the diary is read.

Darin Strauss

You get a bad review with a novel, and it hurts. But I imagine if you get a bad review with a memoir, it hurts more because you can always say, 'Well, they didn't like my characters,' but when you're the character, it's like, 'Oh, yeah, they actually didn't like me.'

Darin Strauss

A subplot is a distinguishing characteristic of the novel; the short story, for example, does not need subplots.

Darin Strauss

My training and my inclination is to invent.

Darin Strauss

If you're guilty of something, you can focus on that, but if something terrible happens, and you can't imagine how you could have changed it, that's very difficult for the mind. In some ways, it's more difficult not to be at fault because it's a subtler thing.

Darin Strauss

Usually, as a fiction writer, you get e-mails saying, 'I liked your book,' or 'I didn't like it.' You don't get something saying, 'I'm really glad this is in the world.'

Darin Strauss

My first book is about twins who are attached: two people who are joined and can't escape each other.

Darin Strauss

I'm really wary of self-help books.

Darin Strauss