A Quote by Carolyn Chute
I am a person who can't teach writing or make a living in any public way, as I get confused when interrupted or overstimulated. In a classroom or crowded room, I all but blank out. So my only income is from novels.
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If I'm talking to someone in a crowded room, I try to make this person feel as though we're the only ones present. I shut out everything else. I look directly at the person. Even if a gorilla were to walk into the room, I probably wouldn't notice it.
The problems you have as a novelist tend to have to do with making a living and trying to find ways to supplement the income you get from writing novels. For a lot of writers, that involves teaching. In my case, so far, I've been able to get by working in Hollywood with this TV stuff I've been doing. And it's very important, because my wife is a writer, too, and we don't have health insurance through any employer.
Even in a crowded room, likable leaders make people feel like they're having a one-on-one conversation, as if they're the only person in the room that matters. And, for that moment, they are. Likable leaders communicate on a very personal, emotional level.
At conventions, one of the standard questions I get is, 'Are you writing any new novels?' To which I used to respond, in my smart-[alec] fashion, 'No, I've decided to write only old novels.'
In prose, you have a lot more room for digression, for very meaty kinds of dialogues. In graphic novels, you're writing haiku-length dialogue. Your job is to be efficient, to get out of the way of the art.
In a way, I see my fiction as having moved in that direction - and the characters as dealing simultaneously with their personal history and with the present in which they are trying to make their way. So that the books are simultaneously about public and interior events. And I am having a great time getting confused and crazed writing about them.
Poets are immersed in process, and I mean process not as an amorphous blur but as a discipline. The hard work of writing has taught me that in matters of the heart, such as writing, or faith, there is no right or wrong way to do it, but only the way of your life. Just paying attention will teach you what bears fruit and what doesn't. But it will be necessary to revise--to doodle, scratch out, erase, even make a mess of things--in order to make it come out right.
Because of the way I've made my money or the way I've conducted myself in public to get success, it doesn't make me any better a person. So I always thought money and achievement would make me a more legitimate person, where my family seems to think it's all about actions.
I started writing juvenile novels around 1985. I never really thought of it as a career, but more as a way to make a living.
I don't think you could teach someone to be a genius, but you can certainly teach them to not make rookie mistakes and to look at writing the way a writer looks at writing, and not just the way a reader looks at writing. There are a lot of techniques and skills that can be taught that will be helpful to anybody, no matter how gifted they are, and I think writing programs can be very good for people.
More than anything I want to get up there and hang out with the audience, make everybody feel like it's fun and they're involved and are just, like, friends hanging out in somebody's living room. I went to see Carole King on her 'Living Room' Tour, and that's the kind of feeling I'm aiming for.
The secret to writing sound effects is having a room you can be alone in, trying to make the sounds yourself, and seeing what comes out. It's similar to if you're writing a character talking with their mouth full: the only way I know to transcribe that is to stuff my fist in my mouth and write down what sounds I make when I try to talk.
If you want to change people by talking about God, then there is only one way: instead of teaching God, you must live God. Because: "teaching" God is unthinkable in any other way than the way you would teach love or poetry. You teach love only through love, poetry only through writing poetry, faith in God only through a contagious way of trusting.
Writing is not like dancing or modeling; it's not something where-if you missed it by age 19-you're finished. It's never too late. Your writing will only get better as you get older and wiser. If you write something beautiful and important, and the right person somehow discovers it, they will clear room for you on the bookshelves of the world-at any age. At least try.
I think my leap into TV and movies and comics is in a way natural because I'm a visual storyteller. If you look at any one of my short stories or novels, they sort of unscroll cinematically. Every scene is concrete in my mind. I can walk around the room and pick things up. I can describe at length every feature on the character, though I might only supply a glimpse of this on the page. So if I'm writing color into that I'm also writing texture, I'm pushing the image more than anything else.
What I see is trying to make sure that everybody thinks you have more than what you actually have. What’s the point if you actually don’t have it? If you don’t have it, then you don’t have it. Have what you have. Enjoy that . . . The craft is everything. Don’t be afraid of not being the wealthiest person in the room. Be the smartest person in the room. Be the slickest person in the room. Be the most creative person in the room. Be the most entertaining person in the room. Just be in the room.
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