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" Very few things are totally devoid of any possibility of humor. If you are aware of that possibility and alive to the scene becoming that way, then it just happens naturally. That's what I feel living is like, too. I find a lot of things that make me smile or make me laugh over the course of the day. "

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" If you become a creative writer with the idea that you are going to make a whole lot of money, then maybe this isn't the best choice for you. "

Tom Drury

Choice

You

Money

" I don't think of my characters as bumbling. I think that trouble is what drives a novel, both big troubles and small troubles, and whatever people try to do in life, there are a series of stumbling-blocks in the way, and I think that makes for interesting reading. I think of them as doing their best with the roadblocks that they're given. "

" I grew up in Swaledale, in Iowa. Its population was 220 when I was growing up, and it's probably 150 now. I lived in town and sometimes worked on the farms outside of town in the summers. "

Tom Drury

Now

Sometimes

" I don't really think in terms of making something that is going to be bought everywhere, because I don't read those things. My writing is a process in which I try my best to make good sentences and a sequence of events that is compelling and believable. "

" I think the book that really kind of woke me up a little bit when I was starting to write was 'Winesburg, Ohio' by Sherwood Anderson. I was in grad school at Brown, going for an M.A. in creative writing. Those stories seemed to me to be doing away with pretty writing. "

" I do get very involved in making a scene work without giving too much thought about how it affects the overall, which I think is hard to know in any case. "

" I really, honest to God, didn't know what to read until I was out of college and living in Boston, and someone said, 'Well, why don't you read Hemingway?' And I thought, 'OK. I guess I'll try this Hemingway fellow.' "

" My dad read, I think, the Perry Mason mysteries and Zane Grey and some humor compendiums... And then at one point, the bookmobile started coming to town. That was really cool. I mean, that was when I read my first Raymond Carver story. I think that was probably 1969 or so. I must have been 13. "

" I don't do nonfiction anymore. Eventually, you just feel constrained by the facts. You want to go where the words take you, and people's actual lives don't always conform. And you can't know them that well. "

" I think, most of us, when we look back over our lives, see perhaps moments when everything was dangerous and precarious. We're making all these mistakes, and yet somehow we make it through. It's the making it through that that interests me. To go through the valley of trouble and come out the other side. That's what we all have to do. "

Tom Drury

Back

Look

" I tend to write about towns because that's what I remember best. You can put a boundary on the number of characters you insert into a small town. I tend to create a lot of characters, so this is a sort of restraint on the character building I do for a novel. "

" My life in the town I grew up in was much quieter than 'The End of Vandalism.' Part of the reason I think I wrote it was because it was too damn quiet when I was young, and I wanted people to come out and talk. And they do. There's so much dialogue in 'The End of Vandalism.' "

" The past has an undeniable grip on everyone, except, perhaps, amnesiacs. "

" Whenever I have tried to make a character bad, they end up being good in some way. "

Tom Drury

Good

Way

" Rather than writing about international events, I write about individual lives. There is elation and sadness, death and birth, love and jealousy, co-operation and betrayal. All the great emotional transactions that happen wherever people come together. "

" I like the writing life, but it's not something that always makes enough money. "