Jincy Willett
Jincy Willett
Jincy Willett is an author and writing teacher currently living in San Diego, California. She has written short pieces for various anthologies and periodicals including the Winter 2006 issue of Timothy McSweeney's Quarterly Concern and Children Playing Before a Statue of Hercules. Her first book, a collection of short stories called Jenny and the Jaws of Life, was initially published in 1987 to critical acclaim but smaller-than-expected sales. The public admiration of Willett's writing expressed by David Sedaris, however, had...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionAuthor
CountryUnited States of America
Honestly, my sales pitch when I was a kid was, 'You don't want these Girl Scout cookies, do you?' If I had to push my own books, I'd stop writing. I hate the conflation of marketing and writing.
Nothing was truly unbearable if you had something to read.
Just start the sentence...and see what happens. This is how we write.
Arithmetic is the death of story.
That's the hard work of writing. The imagining.
You might ask yourself why you want to surprise your readers in the first place. A surprise ending is sort of like a surprise party. Probably some people, somewhere, enjoy having friends and trusted colleagues lunge at them in the sudden blinding light of their own living room, but I don't think most of us do.
Dialogue is generally the worst choice for exposition. When you're writing lines you need to focus on the way people actually talk. And when we talk to each other we never actually explain our terms. We don't say 'Sweetheart, would you pass me the sugar bowl, which we picked up for a song at that antique stall in Munich.'
Reading was not an escape for her, any more than it is for me. It was an aspect of direct experience. She distinguished, of course, between the fictional world and the real one, in which she had to prepare dinners and so on. Still, for us, the fictional world was an extension of the real, and in no way a substitute for it, or refuge from it. Any more than sleeping is a substitute for waking." (Jincy Willett)