A Quote by Stacey D'Erasmo
A lot of first novels are coming-of-age stories. A lot are autobiographical.
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I read a lot of autobiographical stories, and I write plays and prose. And I play piano and cello. A lot of my downtime is devoted to that.
Even if the experience in my stories is not autobiographical and the actual plot is not autobiographical, the emotion is always somewhat autobiographical. I think there's some of me in every one of the stories.
A lot of the novels that I've really enjoyed in my life, whether it's Tolstoy's 'Cossacks,' or 'Sons and Lovers' or 'Jude the Obscure' or 'David Copperfield' or 'Herzog,' have an autobiographical spine.
I think, in a lot of ways, if you really strip down some of the most compelling novels, in a lot of ways, they're detective stories.
Ang [Lee] gave us a lot of books about cowboys who had been gay or stories about it and all that stuff. And I just talked to a lot of my friends - who [was] their first, particularly same-sex, first situation. That was fascinating to me - trying to learn what that was in a certain period of time. Certain age. The secrecy involved in it. All those things.
True stories, autobiographical stories, like some novels, begin long ago, before the acts in the account, before the birth of some of the people in the tale.
Publishers send me a lot of first novels because my first novel was the defining novel of my career, and I guess a lot of people want my benediction or something.
A lot of college graduates approach me about becoming screenwriters. I tell them, 'Do not become a screenwriter, become a journalist,' because journalists go into worlds that are not their own. Kids who go to Hollywood write coming-of-age stories for their first scripts, about what happened to them when they were sixteen. Then they write the summer camp script. At the age of twenty-three they haven't produced anything, and that's the end of the career.
I've read short stories that are as dense as a 19th century novel and novels that really are short stories filled with a lot of helium.
I've told youngsters not to write their autobiographical novel at the age of twenty-one; to save it for the time when they're fifty-one or sixty-one. They should write other novels first, to learn their craft; they shouldn't cut their teeth on the valuable material of childhood because they'll never have better material, ever, to work with.
I could read at a very early age and I loved stories, losing myself in stories, novels.
My first two novels were quirky detective stories followed by a couple of SF/Fantasy novels.
All novels must be autobiographical because I am the only material that I know. All of the characters are me. But at the same time, a novel is never autobiographical even if it describes the life of the author. Literary writing is a completely different medium.
With both novels and short stories, I think a lot in terms of character arcs, when it comes to endings.
I had examples from a very young age of gay actors or personalities coming out in late '90s and early 2000s who faced a lot of backlash and didn't have a lot of support and risked ruining their careers.
I think I'm the first 1990-born guy to win a Masters 1000, so it's quite special to be the first one in a very strong group of guys. There are a lot of guys playing great, and hopefully there are going to be a lot more coming.
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