A Quote by Nick Petrie
I've always been drawn to the extremes of human behavior, and crime fiction is a great way to explore the lives and stories of fascinating people.
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The most popular American fiction seems to be about successful people who win, and good crime fiction typically does not explore that world. But honestly, if all crime fiction was quality fiction, it would be taken more seriously.
There are so many fantastic roles, but the ones that have always drawn me to them are the loners who, for whatever reason, never quite fit in and knew it and had to find their own way. I've always been drawn to that, for some reason. I've always been drawn to that sad, isolated place, but what it produces in behavior is something else, entirely. For whatever reason, I'm drawn to these people. Essentially, I think what draws me is that they are survivors against rather considerable odds.
Stories, as we're taught in journalism school early on, are told through people. Those stories make our documentaries powerful. You can explore someone's culture, you can explore their experience, you can explore an issue through human beings who are going through it.
I'm not sure whay I've been drawn to this subject, except that murder is a subject that has always drawn people for as long as people have been telling stories.
I'm always drawn toward family drama, and dysfunctional family stories. It speaks to me, in a really profound way, and I think there's so much to explore within it.
I grew up reading crime fiction mysteries, true crime - a lot of true crime - and it is traditionally a male dominated field from the outside, but from the inside what we know, those of us who read it, is that women buy the most crime fiction, they are by far the biggest readers of true crime, and there's a voracious appetite among women for these stories, and I know I feel it - since I was quite small I wanted to go to those dark places.
I think being raised within a Mexican Catholic family made magical realism a very natural part of who I am as a person and as a writer. My parents always told us great stories that often had magical elements and roots within Mexican folklore. Also, I remember my father reading a book to me, when I was very young, about the lives of saints. Those were crazy scary stories! Maybe he was trying to scare me into being a good person. In the end, magical realism offers me untethered freedom to explore human frailty and the way we clumsily cobble together our lives on this strange planet.
I am drawn, as a reader, to detail-drenched stories about human lives affected as much by the internal as by the external, the kind of fiction that Jane Smiley nicely describes as 'first and foremost about how individuals fit, or don't fit, into their social worlds.'
To shy away from human extremes and human sensuality makes for bone-dry fiction. A world parched of our sexual releases and our tumultuous daily emotional lives is deeply impoverished. It is not lifelike, at least life as I remember living 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.
I come from a petit bourgeois family, and I've always been drawn to artists and people who choose their own way of life instead of being chosen by the lives that people want for them.
I do like crime thriller stories. That's because these stories have a lot of layers. There are always three sides to such stories... there is a truth, there is a lie and then there is the ultimate truth. Different human emotions and intense interpersonal relationships form the core of stories in this genre.
I'm very lucky to work at bitly, with a data set that allows us to explore human social behavior at the scale of human social behavior.
I love really exploring... you know, a cop drama for example is a great way to explore class in this country and explore, you know, really, identity in the country and who we are in a way that is extremely exciting, but it's also real, you know, it's also real people and real drama. The same with the military. I mean, a good science fiction story is also great.
People whose lives are upside down often read fiction. When you're not sure where you'll end up or how you are going to be, and you're looking for some way forward, fiction is a great friend.
I think you're always drawn to what you love, and I'm always really drawn to things that feel really real and really true to me. I love things that make me think of things in a way I hadn't, and I love looking at people in the world in a way that I hadn't. And sometimes big, huge stories do that for me, but I think I am drawn to smaller ones.
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