Antonya Nelson
Antonya Nelson
Antonya Nelsonis an American author and teacher of creative writing who writes primarily short stories...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionAuthor
Date of Birth6 January 1961
CountryUnited States of America
life dog moving
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.
taken character hardship
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.
efficient enduring logical messy nearly
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.
accustomed aspects common impossible inhabiting lives true ways
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.
characters extremity illuminate
I like the way that psychological extremity can illuminate more 'normal' characters by forcing a comparison.
embrace guess hardly impulse original ought revise revising trust work
I guess the thing I would say most fervently is that your original impulse to write something is an impulse you should trust, and that if it doesn't work on the first draft, which it hardly ever does, the commitment to revising ought to be something you embrace really early. And to revise and revise and revise.
dramas elevate frame groups insight maybe minor operate poems single smaller stories ways
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.
characters hesitant indulge kinds labeled life resist work
I'm a little hesitant to make my characters sentimental or to risk having the work labeled sentimental. It's something that I resist as a reader, and I don't resist it in life. I'm not an unmoved person by any stretch, but I think I don't want, I guess, to indulge those kinds of things sometimes in fiction. I can't tell you why exactly.
among anybody columbia faculty faulkner thesis university william writers wrote
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.
abstinence beauty capture characters girl hypocrisy perfect preaching seem
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.
going-away attention pay
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.
writing mind fiction
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.
real writing thinking
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.
wall simple vocabulary
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.