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" Being scared by a movie offers a safe catharsis, because the terror is confined to the screen. It's an adrenalin spike, and when I come back down, I feel a bit more leveled. "

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" Unlike a novel, where you expect a different kind of arc that leaves us with a somber sense of resolution, I think a story in some ways as like a train window: being able to watch the landscape pass for a certain amount of time. And then your stop arrives, and you have to leave. "

Laura van den Berg

Story

Think

Time

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" Often, contrasts bring art to life: the bright speck of paint on a dark canvas; the tightrope walk between humor and tragedy. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" I am temperamentally drawn to work that shoves the strange and normal against one another, it's true, although I don't see the 'strange' and the 'normal' as being two separate categories of experience; for me, they are intertwined, hard to separate. "

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

" When I'm working on a short story, I could duck into a bathroom at a crowded party and write a scene, which is to say I can work in a very incremental way. "

" Like many artists, I have issues with anxiety and depression, so I try to live in a way that supports my mental health. "

" 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 teach fiction in my workshops, and some of the readings could be classified as horror. For example, 'House Taken Over,' a short story by Julio Cortazar, is a work I regularly teach. "

" 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. "

" Not long after watching 'The Passenger,' I wrote the first lines of 'The Isle of Youth,' which concerns twin sisters who swap identities and become ensnared in the Miami underworld. "

" I realized that, for me, travel for work - I'm not speaking so much about travel for pleasure - had actually become a way of avoiding life. "

" If you're working on a novel, whatever you do, don't say, 'I am almost finished with my novel.' It's worse than chanting Bloody Mary three times in front of a mirror. "

" '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. "

" Like many American readers, I was first introduced to Magda Szabo's work when New York Review Books reissued the Hungarian master's profound and haunting novel 'The Door.' "

" Normally I'm the type who wouldn't bail on a responsibility unless dead on the side of the road, and I believe deeply in the importance of continuing to follow our own paths. "

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

Laura van den Berg

Hear

I Am

" I wager we have a vast amount of literature out there that tends to the stories of men, so I've never really worried too much about attending to stories of women. "

" If we can think of a place, the physicality of a place, as a kind of 'material,' I would say the landscape of Florida in particular was especially important while writing 'Isle.' "

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

" Anxiety and doubt are among my biggest struggles as a writer. "

" The past is an open wound, a life force busily shaping an increasingly bewildering present. "

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

" Holy cow - everything about writing a novel is hard for me. "

" I can't write anything if I don't know where it's set, where the events are happening - even if the details of setting are minimal. "

" 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. "

Laura van den Berg

Kid

World