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" Holy cow - everything about writing a novel is hard for me. "
Laura van den Berg
Holy
Cow
Everything
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" 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. "
Laura van den Berg
Play
Magic
Important
" When I was in grad school, my husband and I used to house sit for a couple in Harvard Square, so we have these amazing memories of great Cambridge summers. "
Laura van den Berg
Great
House
Memories
" America loves a good comeback story! "
Laura van den Berg
Comeback
Story
Good
" I think where a writer falls on the realism/non-realism continuum has a lot to do with their sight, as in, 'This is how I see the world.' And it seems my sight is off-kilter and kind of strange, but I come by that naturally; I'm not consciously pushing toward a particular point on the continuum. "
Laura van den Berg
Think
Sight
See
" Early influences included Lorrie Moore, Amy Hempel, Charles Baxter, Richard Ford, Alice Munro, Denis Johnson - writers who are important to me still and who I discovered through my teachers. "
Laura van den Berg
Teachers
Through
Me
" 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. "
Laura van den Berg
Ideas
Dreams
Words
" 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. "
Laura van den Berg
Party
Say
Duck
" In fiction, we are not bound by social convention, so the things that mystify and unsettle are allowed to rise to the surface. "
Laura van den Berg
Rise
Fiction
Social
" 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. "
Laura van den Berg
Life
World
Work
" The moment when my husband and I clasped hands and turned from our officiant, newly wed, was the most light-filled of my life. "
Laura van den Berg
My Life
Life
Moment
" It's not easy to craft a novel that gradually erodes the reader's comprehension of the world, of reality and identity and the passage of time. "
Laura van den Berg
Time
Easy
Identity
" I really need so much time to really make headway on a novel that requires me to disappear from the world in a way. "
Laura van den Berg
Time
Way
Disappear
" The short story has been here and is here and will be here as long as we are. "
Laura van den Berg
Short
Long
Here
" 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. "
Laura van den Berg
Teach
House
Horror
" Youth is such a fascinating and volatile concoction of vulnerability, dependence, restlessness, relentlessness. You're still learning the terms of the world and of the self, in a very immediate way. "
Laura van den Berg
You
World
Learning
" 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. "
Laura van den Berg
Pleasure
Way
Work
" I love Javier Marias; I love his novel 'Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me.' "
Laura van den Berg
Me
Battle
Think
" When I'm between projects, I keep a journal I call a 'thought log,' and it's my practice to write down whatever interests me. "
Laura van den Berg
Journal
Practice
Me
" I've had a somewhat typical experience in that many of the contemporary writers I was exposed to early on were white and often male. "
Laura van den Berg
Early
Exposed
Many
" Sometimes we talk about memory as though it's firm and fixed, but of course, memory is highly fluid and subjective and thus highly subject to manipulation. "
Laura van den Berg
Talk
Memory
Manipulation
" I love creating mysteries, but I am terrible at solving them. "
Laura van den Berg
I Am
Creating
Am
" I know some writers that have a million novel ideas, but I don't. "
Laura van den Berg
Million
Know
Ideas
" Children tell themselves stories, engage in self-delusion and fantasy, but those narratives are more evolving than calcified - and with that malleability comes both freedom and danger. "
Laura van den Berg
Children
Tell
Fantasy
" I was born and raised in Orlando, where the economy and culture has been powerfully shaped by tourism, and so I've long been interested in how we narrate the places we visit, how the gap between what we see and what we know manifests when we're traveling. "
Laura van den Berg
Culture
Born
Know
" In 'The Third Hotel,' my narrator, Claire, is wrestling with this sense of perpetual unfinishedness. She's trying to make sense of her husband's death, how someone's life can just stop and not continue, and of the lack of resolution in her own inner life. "
Laura van den Berg
Hotel
Trying
She
" I've always been most drawn to fiction that wrestles with that death-fear. Sometimes I joke with my students, 'If no one is in danger of dying, I'm not interested,' but of course I'm not really joking. "
Laura van den Berg
Dying
Students
Always
" If I leave the fictional world for too long, it's a bit like stepping through a portal, entering another reality, and then not knowing how to get back to where you were before. "
Laura van den Berg
Not Knowing
World
Reality
" 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. "
Laura van den Berg
More
Back
Down
" 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. "
Laura van den Berg
Amazing
Fake
Fish
" I've always found the Write-What-You-Know axiom small and stifling. "
Laura van den Berg
Small
Always
Axiom