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" I always tell my students that, in fiction, the opening is a clue to the work's DNA: not only what it is, but what it will become, where it will lead you. "
Laura van den Berg
Always
You
Work
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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. "
Laura van den Berg
More
Back
Down
" 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
" 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
Like
" Fiction accesses a certain kind of truth through artifice. I love to create worlds that operate on their own terms. "
Laura van den Berg
Truth
Create
Kind
" 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. "
Laura van den Berg
You
Uncertainty
Think
" 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
" I love many realists but very strongly resist the notion that realism presents a less stylized, more authentic version of the world. "
Laura van den Berg
Realism
Less
World
" 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 know some writers that have a million novel ideas, but I don't. "
Laura van den Berg
Million
Know
Ideas
" 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. "
Laura van den Berg
Never
Men
Literature
" 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. "
Laura van den Berg
Anything
Events
Know
" As a reader, I appreciate a world that feels unsettled and also visceral, inhabitable, so that's a quality I try and bring to my own work. In this way, dislocation and precision make total sense to me as a unit. "
Laura van den Berg
Work
Quality
Me
" 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 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. "
Laura van den Berg
True
Experience
I Am
" 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
" A collection is, by my lights, a chance to build a universe, an overarching ecosystem. But it's common enough to encounter a hodgepodge instead, where flashes of brilliance are undercut by clunkers. "
Laura van den Berg
Enough
Build
Lights
" To a certain degree, I think both self-narrativizing and selective memory are essential survival skills. "
Laura van den Berg
Memory
Think
Degree
" Paradoxically, the only thing that helps when I'm feeling despairing about writing is to write. "
Laura van den Berg
About
Feeling
Write
" 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.' "
Laura van den Berg
New York
American
Door
" 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've always found the Write-What-You-Know axiom small and stifling. "
Laura van den Berg
Small
Always
Axiom
" Publishing at a young age is not really an indicator of talent. "
Laura van den Berg
Talent
Publishing
Young
" 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. "
Laura van den Berg
You
I Am
Mirror
" In terms of specific cinematic influences, certainly I'd recommend 'Juan de los Muertos,' and I also really love this French zombie movie - 'Les Revenants' - where the dead reanimate for no apparent reason. "
Laura van den Berg
Love
Dead
Where
" I lived in Boston for three years, and during that time, I wrote my first collection of stories, 'What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us;' other stories that didn't make it into the collection; and several failed novel openings. "
Laura van den Berg
Three
Look
Boston
" 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. "
Laura van den Berg
Yourself
Kind
You
" When I'm absorbed in a work of fiction, time and place melts away, as though I've drifted away from my usual reality and been absorbed into another. "
Laura van den Berg
Been
Away
Reality
" When I first left Florida for Boston, I was so eager to shed my Floridian identity, perhaps some of my earlier surreal gestures felt hollow and unconvincing because they were not rising from the particular brand of the uncanny I knew best. "
Laura van den Berg
Brand
Identity
Boston
" America loves a good comeback story! "
Laura van den Berg
Comeback
Story
Good
" 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
Me