Darin Strauss
Darin Strauss
Darin Straussis a best-selling American writer whose work has earned a number of awards, including, among numerous others, a Guggenheim Fellowship and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Strauss's most recent book is Half a Life, which won the 2011 NBCC Award for memoir/autobiography...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth1 March 1970
CountryUnited States of America
good trouble
Like all writing rules, the injunction to start with the trouble can be broken, and it should be sometimes - if there's good reason.
good
Write what you think is good, is the whole of the law.
concrete desire drives early known narrative order primary reader work writer
In order for a narrative to work, the primary character should have a concrete desire - a need that drives her story - and the story's writer should make this goal known to the reader pretty early in the narrative.
chooses freedom novelist permission
The novelist has permission to do whatever she chooses to supercharge whatever's interesting in her story. This is also known as freedom.
layer life private tv viewing
It's a very performative thing, grief. As with so much in modern life, I think there's a whole performative layer to what we do because we feel like there's a private TV show viewing our lives.
borrowing few narrative novelist techniques tricks
If the memoirist is borrowing narrative techniques from fiction, shouldn't the novelist borrow a few tricks from successful non-fiction?
eager engage few giant main people sound trust whose
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.
closest five minutes mojo peace twin
I have twin six-year-old boys. Have no mojo. The closest thing to a mojo I have is five minutes of peace.
address
Too much contemporary fiction seems purposefully to address small things in small ways. And yet why not try for the all-inclusive, the gripping, for the audacious?
glad liked
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.'
finding harder learning mass memoir people ready saw seeing structure yes
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.
awkward cracks old-friendship
The cracks in old friendships are measured in awkward pauses.
kindness self special
Everybody wants life to speak to them with special kindness. Every personal story begs to be steered toward reverie, toward some relief from unpleasant truths: That you are a self, that beyond anything else you want the best for that self. That, if it is to be you or someone else, you need it to be you, no matter what.
senior mom kissing
I'd violated the primary rule of junior and senior high-- don't get people talking about you too much. This was wearing the brightest shirt on the playground. This was Mom giving you a kiss in the lobby.