A Quote by T.C. Boyle

I was joking earlier when I said that all writers are manic depressives, but it's a joke with a lot of truth behind it. For fiction writers and poets, too, there's something wrong with you and you do this art as a way of correcting it or addressing it in some way.
It's safe to say that all poets are manic-depressives, but fiction writers are on that scale, too.
We're trying to make something that lasts in language and there's no question that many fiction writers began as poets and it's hard for me to think of any good fiction writers who don't also read poetry.
I really need to know where I'm going with fiction to write it in a way that at least I'm happy with. And I really think that a lot of fiction books end badly because terrific writers said, "I'll just figure it out" and plunge in, but have created so many problems that they are kind of impossible to solve. I mean, I'm talking really good writers do this and you can tell when they got to the end they either had to do something preposterous or they just don't really resolve things. So for fiction I spend a lot more time outlining and for humor I really don't do much of it.
When I taught at the University of Houston in the Creative Writing program we required the poets to take workshops in fiction writing and we required the fiction writers to take workshops in poetry. And the reason for that is because the fiction writers seemed to need to learn how to pay greater attention to language itself, to the way that language works.
Manic depressives have all the luck; they soar between crashes. The best us regular depressives can do is battle our way up to normal every now and then.
I don't believe that fiction is dead. I know there are some people who believe that it's an outdated art form, and that to express truth today you need to work in different forms, to write books where it's perhaps not clear what's fiction and what's memoir. I have nothing against those books and love many of them very much. But we have enough space for everyone, traditional realists and hybrid writers, and experimental writers all.
I'm a line-maker. I think that's what makes poets different from prose-writers. That's the main way. We think, not just in sentences the way prose writers do but also in lines. So we're doing these two things at the same time.
Some people are able to not only entertain the public in any way that they can but also in some way to throw in some sort of inspirational message with the entertainment. I have always tried to do that with whatever I wrote. And I'm sure that a lot of other writers do, too.
We writers โ€“ and especially writers for children, but all writers โ€“ have an obligation to our readers: it's the obligation to write true things, especially important when we are creating tales of people who do not exist in places that never were โ€“ to understand that truth is not in what happens but what it tells us about who we are. Fiction is the lie that tells the truth, after all.
Fiction writers are strange beasts. They are, like all writers, observers first and foremost. Everything that happens to and around them is potential material for a story, and they look at it that way.
Narco fiction novels have a reputation, at least here in Mexico among some of the writers I know, of being somewhat rushed productions, usually written in one way or another like crime thrillers, with something cheesily exploitative about them. It feels exploitive - taking this horrible and ongoing tragedy and trying to turn it into something entertaining. Or trying to turn it into something that might earn the writer a reputation of the sort that many writers believe they aspire to. Or earn them money.
I'm ambivalent about the Orange Prize. I was really proud to be shortlisted alongside the other writers, whom I admire. That said, I don't know if it's best way of addressing gender inequality problems.
I've taken a lot of crap. That's just the way life is. There are going to be writers who like you and writers who despise you.
I'm one of the few Black writers, or African American writers, who managed to work my way through the system so that it has allowed me to speak in a kind of free way. But most African American writers don't have that. They don't have that opportunity, they don't have that.
My way of joking is to tell the truth. That's the funniest joke in the world.
My father was a writer; I've known a lot of children of writers - daughters and sons of writers, and it can be a hard way to grow up.
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