Dana Spiotta
Dana Spiotta
Dana Spiottais an American author. Her novel Stone Arabiawas a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist. Her novel Eat the Documentwas a National Book Award finalist and won the Rosenthal Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her novel Lightning Fieldwas a New York Times Notable Book of the year. She was a recipient of the Rome Prize in Literature, a Guggenheim Fellowship and a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionAuthor
CountryUnited States of America
coherence satisfaction authenticity
A good novel should be deeply unsettling - its satisfactions should come from its authenticity and its formal coherence. We must feel something crucial is at stake.
long lazy afternoon
We exist because of suburbia. Suburbia is a freak’s dreamworld, a world of extra rooms upstairs and long, lazy afternoons with no interference. A place where you can listen to your LPs for hours on end. You can live in your room, your own rent-free corner of the universe, and create a world of pleasure and interest entirely centered on yourself and your interior aesthetic and logic.
writing breathing order
In order to be a living, breathing thing, a novel has to be failed in some kind of way. Or at least that's how I keep writing them.
great-restaurants invisible great-food
Although a great restaurant experience must include great food, a bad restaurant experience can be achieved through bad service alone. Ideally, service is invisible. You notice it only when something goes wrong.
teacher book skills
I don't have a lot of skills, but one thing I can do is, I can compartmentalize. I can make that a little world that I can go back to, so I can be a waitress, or I can be a teacher, and then go and work on my book.
writing laundry wells
I am a great procrastinator. When the writing is going really well, the laundry piles up.
book mean kids
I like to buy books for the kids in my family. I guess that's why they call me the 'mean' aunt.
writing technology trying
I try to write about how we live today, how we use language, technology, our bodies.
teaching thinking giving
My teaching forces me to articulate what I think works in a piece of fiction and how I think it works. All of that gives me energy as a writer.
writing long novel
It takes a long time to write a novel when you have to keep interrupting your work to earn money.
always-trying curiosity attention
I am always trying to do something new and different. The first step is curiosity, questions. You pay attention to what fascinates you. If you can't shake it, there is something there.
moving character ideas
There are lots of authentic, moving characters in so-called systems novels, just as there are certainly deep structural ideas in some character-driven novels.
writing character emotional
I think there's a false division people sometimes make in describing literary novels, where there are people who write systems novels, or novels of ideas, and there are people who write about emotional things in which the movement is character driven. But no good novels are divisible in that way.
meaningful want chance
Tell me it's forbidden, unthinkable, and that's where I want to go. Because the chances are it's complicated, and the complications are meaningful.