A Quote by Alexandra Fuller
For a memoir to really succeed, the author has to do such hard work before they come to the page. They have to do a brutal self-examination of everything they believe to be true.
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I try to remember who I am and what I come from, because I didn't come from super means. I had to work and pray and try really hard to succeed and get everything that I wanted out of life.
I love writing both fiction and memoir. Both have unique challenges; bottom line, fiction is hard because you have to come up with the credible, twisty plot, and memoir is hard because you have to say something true and profound, albeit in a funny way.
People don't have to believe in you for you to succeed. Just work hard, when you succeed, they will believe.
If you are one of those people who believe that hard work and honesty alone will bring riches-perish the thought; because it's not true. Riches, when they come in huge quantities, are never the result of hard work. Riches come if they come at all, in response to definite demands, based upon the application of definite principles, and not by chance or luck.
It's weird being an author because it's different than writing songs. You put so much more of yourself out there to be judged because it's a memoir. So when the reviews come in, they all feel really personal. Some people are just going to hate you no matter what. Personally, I never believe good reviews.
Before I'm a writer, I'm definitely a reader and when I read memoir, I really want it to be true.
Transcendent Oneness does not require self-examination, self-help, or self-work. It requires self-loss.
I find it interesting that people often seem to believe that authors of realistic fiction are directly translating their personal experiences into their work. The fact is that telling a story is a transformative experience. There is rarely a one-to-one translation onto the page unless you're writing memoir, and even then, memory is unreliable. I think that the best books feel emotionally true, and that truth has to be rooted in real-world experience.
I truly believe that everything happens for a reason. So you asked, ‘When things get really, really difficult in your life, what keeps you going?’ For me, it’s always that the most difficult moments in my life, the moments in which I believe I’ve completely failed or hit bottom, I can actually directly link them to something later that is either a true success or a dream come true. So, I do believe that if you can maintain that everything happens for a reason, you can find the strength and the lesson in those difficult moments and grow stronger.
Nowadays with the internet, it's an equal opportunity brutal playing field. I mean, everyone is brutal to everybody half the time. People can be unbelievably brutal on the internet, about everything. But they can also be really, really nice. The problem is that human beings like to focus on the negative sometimes, unfortunately.
You have to really believe in what you're doing, be passionate enough about it so that you will put in the hours and hard work that it takes to actually succeed there, and then you'll be successful.
When the publisher here in America wanted to put the word "memoir" on the title page [of 'Winter Journal'] and on the cover, I said, "No, no, no, no, no, no." No genre whatsoever. It's an independent work not really connected to those things at all.
Just always believe in yourself... and dreams - and dreams do come true. For me to play in the same city I grew up in, I mean... I'm definitely blessed. But just always believe in yourself. And work hard. And dreams definitely come true.
It's hard to get material. I haven't made a movie before. I have two episodes of television that I think have come in really great, but it's really hard to get directing work.
Because every book of art, be it a poem or a cupola, is understandably a self-portrait of its author, we won't strain ourselves too hard trying to distinguish between the author's persona and the poem's lyrical hero. As a rule, such distinctions are quite meaningless, if only because a lyrical hero is invariably an author's self-projection.
I think we all need to believe in hope: that if we have dreams and if we have ambitions and if we have skills and talents - that if you really put your heart into something and you work at it hard enough - that you can make your dreams come true.
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