Andrew Roe

Find out here (it’s a new story of mine that’s in A-Minor Magazine, and it’s one of those he/she stories that I seem to be so fond of).

“I was a semiconscious writer in the beginning. Just sat and wrote something, or read the newspaper, or went to the movies. Over time I began to understand, one, that I was lucky to be doing this work, and, two, that the only way I’d get better at it was to be more serious, to understand the rigors of novel-writing and to make it central to my life, not a variation on some related career choice, like sportswriting or playwriting. The novel is different. . . . We die indoors, and alone, and I don’t mean to sound overdramatic but you know what I’m talking about. Anyway, all of this happened over time, until eventually discipline no longer seemed something outside me that urged the reluctant body into the room. At this point discipline is inseparable from what I do. It’s not even definable as discipline. It has no name. I never think about it. But there’s no trick of meditation or self-mastery that brought it about. I got older, that’s all. I was not a born novelist (if anyone is). I had to grow into novelhood.”

— Don DeLillo in a 1995 letter to David Foster Wallace

From an article about New Yorker editor David Remnick (by Nicholson Baker):

“Remnick is modest about these writing successes, which he attributes chiefly to ‘sitzfleisch’ – the capacity to sit in a chair until the work is done. ‘A lot of what I do is just the mental illness of persistence,’ he told me.”

I need to work on my sitzfleisch.

That’s advice from Bret Anthony Johnston in the Atlantic’s annual fiction issue.

I guess this issue has been on my mind lately (see posts below).

Here’s a quote from the Johnston’s article:

“I don’t know the origin of the ‘write what you know’ logic. A lot of folks attribute it to Hemingway, but what I find is his having said this: ‘From all things that you know and all those you cannot know, you make something through your invention that is not a representation but a whole new thing truer than anything true and alive.’ If this is the logic’s origin, then maybe what’s happened is akin to that old game called Telephone… A similar transmission problem undermines the logic of writing what you know and, ironically, Hemingway may have been arguing against it all along. The very act of committing an experience to the page is necessarily an act of reduction, and regardless of craft or skill, vision or voice, the result is a story beholden to and inevitably eclipsed by source material.”

The novel I’m working on is not autobiographical. But the place where it’s set is where I’m from. Sort of…