A Quote by Donald Ray Pollock
I was 35 when I started taking classes at Ohio University. After I got my degree, I kept working at the mill. When I was 45, I decided I was going to try to learn how to write short stories.
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You can't learn to write that way - by writing directly for the screen. Wait until you're 30. But in the meantime write 200 short stories. You've got to learn how to write!
Like many writers, I started by writing short stories. I needed to learn how to write and stories are the most practical way to do this, and less soul-destroying than working your way through a lengthy novel and then discovering it's rubbish.
I started going to Ohio University when I was in my mid-thirties, ended up with an English degree when I was forty.
I started taking classes and doing things that I had always wanted to do but couldn't because I was working. I signed up for a bunch of workout classes, and to my surprise, I realized I was enjoying it. Because I was working out so much, I started looking for more workout clothes and found a lot of redundancy - predictability that was uninspired. That's when I decided to start my own line.
I started writing the book without realizing I was writing a book. That sounds stupid, but it's true. I'd been trying and failing to make a different manuscript work, and I thought I was just taking a break by writing some short stories. I'm not a very good short story writer - the amazing compression that is required for short stories doesn't come easily to me. But anyway, I thought I'd try to write some short stories. And a structure took shape - I stumbled upon it.
I took a correspondence course with a guy at Ohio University. He gave me ten exercises, and one of them resulted in the story "Bactine." It pleased me a lot more than anything else I'd ever done, so I kept messing around and by the time I got to Ohio State I'd written maybe eight stories.
I was educated in the Washington public schools and attended the University of Maryland as a day student, graduating in 1938 with a degree in chemistry. After working for the Dow Chemical Company in Midland, Michigan, for a year, I returned to the University of Maryland to take a Master's degree before going on to Yale to pursue a doctorate.
I want an Ohio State degree, and not all of their classes are online, so it might have to be after I retire.
You can write when you're dyslexic, you just can't read it. But I started writing short stories as a child and I found the short story format a real nice one. I love short stories and I love short documentaries or short films of any kind.
I decided to write short stories because they got rejected quicker.
I got a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree at the Catholic University of America in D.C. and started working as an understudy at the Arena.
I started writing because I wanted to write scripts, but I wasn't very good at it. Then I started writing short stories, sort of as treatments for the film scripts, and I found I enjoyed writing short stories far more than I enjoyed writing film scripts. Then the short stories got longer and longer and suddenly, I had novels.
The only way, I think, to learn to write short stories is to write them, and then try to discover what you have done.
I remember so many times taking classes and feeling completely discouraged because I felt like I wasn't getting it and I couldn't understand. I kept working at it and I kept going back to class, and I wouldn't let myself get intimidated or get scared away, and it really does pay off.
[Jorge Luis Borges] had short stories, and I was trying to learn how to write short stories, and then he had these things in the middle that were like fables, and I loved hearing fables.
Don’t try to write a novel. Write short stories and then figure out how to connect them.
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