A Quote by Matthew Desmond

When I left Milwaukee, and I had all these stories. I felt so responsible for people. It's a heck of a thing to do, to try to write someone's story. — © Matthew Desmond
When I left Milwaukee, and I had all these stories. I felt so responsible for people. It's a heck of a thing to do, to try to write someone's story.
I knew what I wanted to do when I set out. I knew that I wanted to write a book that told the story, obviously. I wanted it be comedy first, because I felt like there already had been childhood druggy stories that were very serious, and I felt that the unique thing here was that I was a comic and I could tell the story with some levity, and I have been laughing at these stories my whole life.
I had long wanted to write a love story, and I had long - wisely, I felt - shirked the challenge because I felt it the hardest story of all to write.
Raymond Carver had the quote that I loved about how he felt that a short story was the moment right before someone's life was about to fall apart. You can't really do that with a novel, but with a story you're just left hanging.
It is truly excellent to have someone believe in you and your ability to write. But I think it is just as helpful to have people who don't believe in you, people who mock you, people who doubt you, people who enrage you. Fortunately, there is never a shortage of this type of person in the world ... write for yourself. Write for the story. And write, also, for all of the people who doubt you. Write for all those people who are not brave enough to do this grand and wondrous thing themselves. Let them motivate you.
If I had a story idea that I felt would work best in three volumes I might write a trilogy eventually. I'd very likely write it all at once, though, so I could work on it as a whole and not broken into individual volumes. I don't always write in order, so composing multi-book stories could get complicated.
There are a lot of people in Milwaukee who have had adverse impacts from Scott Walker. He's managed to mess over everyone in Milwaukee.
Well, when people ask where I'm from, I usually say the Midwest, because that covers both homes, in a way. Obviously I was born in Omaha, but when people say, "Where do you come from," we'll say Milwaukee. I mean Jennifer was certainly born in Milwaukee, and that's where I spent a big chunk of my adult life, so we usually say we came here from Milwaukee. That's usually how it's referenced is we're from Milwaukee, yeah.
I felt like Alan Turing's story was such an important story to tell, and it was so wonderful to write the script and other people find it and say, 'I never heard this story.' It's such an amazing story that people don't believe it.
I had written many things as a journalist, but I had no idea if I could write something scary or romantic or touching that wasn't me writing about someone else's life story. It was really exciting to try.
Short story writers simply do what human beings have always done. They write stories because they have to; because they cannot rest until they have tried as hard as they can to write the stories. They cannot rest because they are human, and all of us need to speak into the silence of mortality, to interrupt and ever so briefly stop that quiet flow, and with stories try to understand at least some of it.
So I found myself telling my own stories. It was strange: as I did it I realised how much we get shaped by our stories. It's like the stories of our lives make us the people we are. If someone had no stories, they wouldn't be human, wouldn't exist. And if my stories had been different I wouldn't be the person I am.
A lot of people would write to me long stories from their lives, and I felt they were thinking of me as some sort of treasure chest to keep their secrets. I felt like sometimes they would tell me stories they wouldn't tell anybody else in the whole world. And I loved these stories.
I started writing by doing small related things but not the thing itself, circling it and getting closer. I had no idea how to write fiction. So I did journalism because there were rules I could learn. You can teach someone to write a news story. They might not write a great one, but you can teach that pretty easily.
We who make stories know that we tell lies for a living. But they are good lies that say true things, and we owe it to our readers to build them as best we can. Because somewhere out there is someone who needs that story. Someone who will grow up with a different landscape, who without that story will be a different person. And who with that story may have hope, or wisdom, or kindness, or comfort. And that is why we write.
When people write the history of this thing, of bitcoin, they are not going to write the story of 6 million to a billion. What is truly remarkable is the story of zero to 6 million. It has already happened! And we’re not paying attention! That’s incredible. That’s what had one chance in a million and it already happened.
I think the reason the stories are briskly paced, when they are, is that I like story. I like stories where things happen and there are surprises and reversals, in addition to vivid characters and a memorable voice. So those are the kinds of stories I try to write. And it turns out that's pretty much the only kind of writing that works for TV. It's a medium that just devours story, demands surprises and reversals. So my sensibility is suited to TV storytelling, at least as we think of it today.
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