Joy Williams
Joy Williams
Joy Williamsis an American novelist, short story writer, and essayist...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth11 February 1944
CountryUnited States of America
house moved
It's really been rough. We just moved in a house with me and my kid, and everything is gone.
beyond love
There must be something beyond love. I want to get there.
converge
Many writers today are wanderers. There is not only an unhousedness in language - how to convey, to say nothing of converge - but an unhousedness of place.
home material
Everything is gone. And it's not so much the material things. It's just ... that's home.
almost bark crashing deck dim fading gaps gotten grey heard lay leaving moving pink save sky time toward trees wild woods
The woods were wild at nightfall. She heard dim crashing and splashes and the bark of a dog, and through the gaps in the trees was a mottled sky of fading pink and grey discs, microbes moving toward the west. She had almost gotten away but not in time and now leaving wouldn't save her. She lay down on the deck with the woods all around her.
giving-up tired heart
Someone once told me a story about long term relationships. To think of them as a continent to explore. I could spend a lifetime backpacking through Africa, and I would still never know all there is to know about that continent. To stay the course, to stay intentional, to stay curious and connected - that's the heart of it. But it's so easy to lose track of the trail, to get tired, to want to give up, or to want a new adventure. It can be so easy to lose sight of the goodness and mystery within the person sitting right in front of you.
writing dark light
A writer loves the dark, loves it, but is always fumbling around in the light.
stories doe said
The story knows itself better than the writer does at some point, knows what's being said before the writer figures out how to say it.
mean worry why-things-happen
You must stop worrying about why things happen and wonder what they mean when they do.
writing care these-days
It's become fashionable these days to say that the writer writes because he is not whole, he has a wound, he writes to heal it, but who cares if the writer is not whole; of course the writer is not whole, or even particularly well.
beautiful morning writing
The writer trusts nothing she writes-it should be too reckless and alive for that, it should be beautiful and menacing and slightly out of control. . . . Good writing . . . explodes in the reader's face. Whenever the writer writes, it's always three or four or five o'clock in the morning in her head.
writing process writing-process
There is something unwholesome and destructive about the entire writing process.
dark people ordinary
What a story is, is devious. It pretends transparency, forthrightness. It engages with ordinary people, ordinary matters, recognizable stuff. But this is all a masquerade. What good stories deal with is the horror and incomprehensibi lity of time, the dark encroachment of old catastrophes...
done usual suspects
Of course there is nothing that cannot be done incorrectly.