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" As for me, I was a lonely kid, with few close friends until I was an adult - even when I might have been perceived as being on the inside, I felt like I was on the outside, kind of like viewing the world through a sheet of glass. "

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" Florida is a very idiosyncratic place in a lot of ways - as are many parts of our fine country, but one could say Florida is particularly idiosyncratic. "

Laura van den Berg

Ways

Country

Place

" I am a pretty omnivoracious reader in respect to prose style, but if the prose doesn't have its own music, if the relationship to the sentence seems unconsidered or superficial, I have a really hard time reading the work. "

" Publishing at a young age is not really an indicator of talent. "

" Fiction accesses a certain kind of truth through artifice. I love to create worlds that operate on their own terms. "

" I once took a workshop with Jim Shepard, and he has this term, 'rate-of-revelation,' that has come to mean a lot to me: 'the pace at which we're learning crucial emotional information about the stories' central figures.' An ever-increasing rate-of-revelation is good; a stagnant r-of-r is not. "

" I love many realists but very strongly resist the notion that realism presents a less stylized, more authentic version of the world. "

" I've always found the Write-What-You-Know axiom small and stifling. "

" 'Find Me' I think, is brooding in a very literal sense of the word in that you have all of these sort of interior storm that's growing within Joy over the course of the book and leading her to her moment. And certainly, I think there's an aspect of the supernatural. "

" As we know all too well, our early years are formative in ways it can takes us a lifetime to grasp. Those years leave deep marks; in that way, the stakes of childhood are inherently very high. "

" I love Javier Marias; I love his novel 'Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me.' "

Laura van den Berg

Battle

Think

" I love creating mysteries, but I am terrible at solving them. "

Laura van den Berg

I Am

Creating

" In the novels I most admire, there is this sense that, within the confines of the world, the possibilities are always opening in new and surprising ways - that was a quality I strived to capture, with the hope that the reader would be willing to follow me. "

" My students are often asking me, 'What do you think are the most important qualities for a writer?' And one thing I always tells them is that it's helpful to be willing to sit in a space of uncertainty. There are entire years, especially with novels, where you really don't know where the project is going. "

" If I'm really rolling with a short story, I work on it everywhere and end up with a finished draft in a couple months, but a novel really demands that I step out of my life and vanish into the world of the book. "

" A sense of play is important when I'm writing, and so messing around with, say, a magic routine can feel like play, at least initially. "

" Havana is a uniquely complicated city and contains a great many histories. "

" With both novels and short stories, I think a lot in terms of character arcs, when it comes to endings. "

" I do not work well when I am in living in a cyclone of panic. I reject actively seeking out destabilization and suffering as a creative model. "

" In fiction, we are not bound by social convention, so the things that mystify and unsettle are allowed to rise to the surface. "

" I'm pretty sure that I've never confessed in an interview my weakness for McDonald's Filet-O-Fish. The cheese is fake. Who knows what that 'fish' really is. It is gross. It is amazing. "

" As a young writer, I was sort of sailing around trying to 'find my voice' - for lack of a better term - and I was really chafing against the very minimal brand of domestic realism that I'd read so much of in college. "

" I know some writers that have a million novel ideas, but I don't. "

" I am an incorrigible eavesdropper, so I am very much influenced by what I hear. "

Laura van den Berg

Hear

I Am

" I think my concern is I know my voice, and I know the kinds of landscapes that interest me, so my primary concern is doing the most I can with those voices and those landscapes. "

" To a certain degree, I think both self-narrativizing and selective memory are essential survival skills. "

" Florida is a most unusual place. It can feel at once stifling and like anything is possible there. "

Laura van den Berg

Anything Is Possible

Place

" America loves a good comeback story! "

" I love noir, quite obviously. "

" I take a pretty expansive view of craft, which is to say I don't see craft as just being technique - it's also process; subject; ideas and feelings; visions and dreams; the words that are put down and the words that are avoided. "

" The kind of dystopian books that I've always loved the most are the ones where you find yourself in a world that's less scorched-earth and instead a world that has just been made different. "