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" Like many artists, I have issues with anxiety and depression, so I try to live in a way that supports my mental health. "
Laura van den Berg
Mental Health
Depression
Health
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" I think writing, or any form of art-making, is a way to prepare for not being here. Not that we can. No amount of preparing can really ready us, in a meaningful way, for the great void that awaits us all. "
Laura van den Berg
Think
Way
Writing
" 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
" 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
" I think that one thing about teaching is you're trying to communicate your thoughts about a work to a group of people who may or may not share that sentiment. This has forced me to become a lot more articulate about what I respond to and what I don't respond to in fiction. "
Laura van den Berg
Me
You
Work
" 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
" 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 think my favorite horror films are really grounded in human psychology, which is to say I think through sort of extreme dislocations of reality. "
Laura van den Berg
Think
Horror
Human
" 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. "
Laura van den Berg
World
Possibilities
Quality
" 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. "
Laura van den Berg
Good
Learning
Mean
" '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. "
Laura van den Berg
Storm
Book
Joy
" 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. "
Laura van den Berg
Voice
Trying
College
" Publishing at a young age is not really an indicator of talent. "
Laura van den Berg
Talent
Publishing
Young
" I love noir, quite obviously. "
Laura van den Berg
Love
Obviously
Noir
" 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
" I think we're often guilty of gravitating towards the familiar. Even if we recognize that certain patterns are unsatisfying and destructive, there can still be a comfort in the familiar recognition of a cycle repeating itself. "
Laura van den Berg
Think
Recognition
Guilty
" I know some writers that have a million novel ideas, but I don't. "
Laura van den Berg
Million
Know
Ideas
" 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
" Paradoxically, the only thing that helps when I'm feeling despairing about writing is to write. "
Laura van den Berg
About
Feeling
Write
" There's the public self that we present to the outer world. There's the private self, which maybe takes more time to access. But ultimately, what I'm most interested in as a writer is a few notches below the private self. "
Laura van den Berg
World
More
Present
" I am an incorrigible eavesdropper, so I am very much influenced by what I hear. "
Laura van den Berg
Hear
I Am
Am
" 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 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
" 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
" 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
" To a certain degree, I think both self-narrativizing and selective memory are essential survival skills. "
Laura van den Berg
Memory
Think
Degree
" 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
" I'm such a first-person writer. "
Laura van den Berg
First-Person
Writer
" 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
" I love Javier Marias; I love his novel 'Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me.' "
Laura van den Berg
Me
Battle
Think