Jenny Offill
Jenny Offill
Jenny Offillis an American novelist...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionAuthor
CountryUnited States of America
inhabit writer
I think part of what I like about being a fiction writer is that I can inhabit something that's beyond the limits of my own personality.
writer
What I try to capture as a writer is the feeling of being alive, of being awake.
cross distilled domestic interested life novel slightly streak
I have a slightly contrarian streak as a writer, and one of the things I was interested in was how distilled could I make a life, and how I could cross what is kind of trivialized as a domestic novel with a novel of ideas, a philosophical novel.
catch certain classic kept linear maybe note novel parts point seemed worked written wrote
I had written a novel that was more of a classic linear novel, and I worked on it and worked on it for years, and it always seemed like it wouldn't catch fire. At a certain point I just scrapped it all, and I kept maybe 15 percent of it, and I wrote those parts out on note cards.
felt rushes
I felt like I could write about quiet, self-contained moments and also about those moments when the world rushes in again.
books call chance collect facts flip library operation outdated quotes reference strike time
Oh, I collect facts and quotes when I can't write, and I can't write most of the time. I do a little chance operation sometimes where I flip through outdated reference books to see if anything will strike me as beautiful or momentous. Library roulette, I call it.
bull candy dawn fall great habits laid matter midnight reasonable stores sure work
I like to write from midnight to dawn with great stores of candy and Red Bull laid in... I'm not sure why I have the work habits of a 20-year-old coder, but no matter how many times I set up a more reasonable schedule, I always fall back to this.
life perhaps scream timid
I can be bolder on the page, as a character. I can gnash my teeth, I can scream and yell, in a way that I'm perhaps too timid to do in real life.
years self birth
Also she signed away the right to self-destruct years ago. The fine print on the birth certificate, her friends call it.
years kind desks
For years, I kept a Post-it note above my desk. WORK NOT LOVE! was what it said. It seemed a sturdier kind of happiness.
ambition looks coats
Some women make it look so easy, the way they cast ambition off like an expensive coat that no longer fits.
tired imagine courtesy
A thought experiment courtesy of the Stoics. If you are tired of everything you possess, imagine that you have lost all these things.
fun love-is like-love
The only love that feels like love is the doomed kind. (Fun fact.)
thinking tunnels blue
You think you want the blue skies, the open road, but really you want the tunnel, you want to know how the story ends.