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" Short fiction is like low relief. And if your story has no humor in it, then you're trying to look at something in the pitch dark. With the light of humor, it throws what you're writing into relief so that you can actually see it. "

Elizabeth McCracken

Writing

Story

Short

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" Life likes jokes; life is constantly making jokes, even at the most inopportune moments. "

" My mother's family didn't speak much about Europe: My mother was born in 1935, and her new-world parents were the sort who didn't want to worry their children about the war. "

" For about half an hour in mid-1992, I knew as much as any layperson about the pleasures of remote access of other people's computers. "

" I feel like I don't understand time in novels, really. I bumble forward, is all. "

Elizabeth McCracken

Forward

Feel

" In the last century, I earned my living as a librarian, and I loved it. I'd have to take some classes to get up to speed with 21st-century librarianship. "

Elizabeth McCracken

Last

Living

" There's a good chance that in 40 years, after the floods, people zipping by on scavenged jetpacks with their scavenged baseball caps on backwards, I will be in my rocking chair saying bitterly, 'I remember when 'all right' was two words.' "

" I have been the person who tries to keep conversation light while talking to someone whose heart has been smashed. "

" I have a memory of my fourth-grade self wanting to be the first woman president of the United States, but I think that has a lot more to do with my love of world records and reference books than a love of serving my country. "

" The walls of the Franciscan Church of the Assumption of the Holy Virgin Mary were ruined stucco chipping away from the brick underneath, with ghostly frescoes, concrete-filled niches, and one complete, vivid crucifix painted over the altar. "

" I like seeing my physical progress through a volume, particularly if it's a big book. "

Elizabeth McCracken

Seeing

Through

" Revising stuff lately, I was shocked to see how often my characters scratched their ankles, felt their feet, and touched their own ears. "

" When I tell people there are three stories in 'Thunderstruck' that were from the same wrecked novel, they want to guess what they are. Nobody has. There are no characters or timelines in common. They're structured very differently. A good novel wouldn't have pulled apart so easily. "

" I can't imagine not joking even at the worst of times. And for me, it's sort of automatic. "

Elizabeth McCracken

Even

Sort

" Tweeting about objects means I don't need to bid on them, which is a blessing. Buying something is a way of saying, 'Look at this!' So is tweeting. So, I guess, is writing fiction. "

" I'm astounded by people who can listen to music when they write. I can only assume that they have multi-track brains, while mine is decidedly single. "

" When I first met my husband, he was sculpting Vilnius out of clay - a sort of Vilnius, anyhow: a map of an imaginary European city based on the Lithuanian capital - to illustrate his second novel. "

" When you've lost a baby, everyone around you expects you to be fine once the new baby is born, as though that somehow takes away the pain of losing the first child. I needed to express how wrong that was. "

" In library science school, back in the years of glowing green non-graphical screens and protocols called Archie and Veronica, I wrote Internet documentation. "

" I wanted to acknowledge that life goes on but that death goes on, too. A person who is dead is a long, long story. "

" I work in my office on the campus of the University of Texas. It's the sort of place described as 'book-lined', but it's recently tipped over into 'fire-hazard' territory. "

" Ordinarily, I'd claim that I'd never write directly about my children, but the opening conversation of 'Peter Elroy' is a verbatim conversation that my children had that I just loved: morbid, funny, passionate, and obsessed with the truth of things - all natural qualities of children that I'd like my work to contain. "

" When I was in college, I wrote poetry very seriously, and then once I had started writing short stories, I didn't go back to poetry, partially because I felt like I understood how incredibly difficult it was. "

" New Orleans is still the place where you find out that you have a doppelganger and feel lucky - but somehow unsurprised - to learn that his name is Mad Bottom. "

" You believe in God or statistics or the way your narrative differs from other people. "

" I sort of don't believe in closure. In the sense that it doesn't make me feel better to think that something is over. "

" I've always been absolutely appalling about the future, but I sort of think that was my childhood religion. We were future deniers. You did your best in the present, which was all around you. "

" There are two MFA programs here at the University of Texas, and I read on the jury of both of them. And it's amazing to me how many really talented young writers seem to fear humor. "

" In general, I think people are worried about saying the wrong thing to any grieving person. On a very basic level, I think they're frightened of touching off tears or sorrow, as though someone tearing up at the mention of unhappy news would be the mentioner's fault. "

" It's hard to know which made me more aware of the impossibility of protecting children - having a child die or having had two live. "

Elizabeth McCracken

Child

Know

" You write the way you think about the world. My motto in times of trouble - and I'm speaking of life, not writing - is 'no humor too black.' "