Antonya Nelson
Antonya Nelson
Antonya Nelsonis an American author and teacher of creative writing who writes primarily short stories...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionAuthor
Date of Birth6 January 1961
CountryUnited States of America
I want to earn a reader's capacity to be moved.
characters extremity illuminate
I like the way that psychological extremity can illuminate more 'normal' characters by forcing a comparison.
accustomed aspects common impossible inhabiting lives true ways
Empathy is not as complicated when you have some aspects in common with your character; it's not impossible to know someone who's like you in many ways but different in one. This is true especially if you are a reader. Reading makes you accustomed to inhabiting other lives and sensibilities.
efficient enduring logical messy nearly
The most enduring battle is between head and heart; what would be efficient and logical is nearly always trumped by what is messy and illogical.
stars kindness dizzy
Melissa Pritchard's prose, that darkly lyrical firmament, is brightened by the dizzy luminous arrangement of her stars and satellites, her great gifts to us: humor, irony, kindness, brilliance.
book character successful
If the book is finished—published and on the shelf—I do not think of revising it. But if I'm not finished psychologically with characters, they will recur, either as themselves or as new, slightly altered manifestations, and their same issues will reappear. It's a matter of the subject and emotional investment and my own obsessive thinking about various issues It's an unconscious process. To say that a single story is not done isn't quite true. A story can be finished and judged successful or not by somebody else, but if the issue is not done for me, I can count on its reappearance.
life dog moving
You own a dog with the knowledge that it will move through the stages of existence in fast forward, providing you with a lesson about your own life passages if you let it.
taken character hardship
Readers will share in the environs of the author and her characters, be taken into the hardship of a pitiless place and emerge on the other side — wiser, warier and weathered like the landscape.
revenge nice justice
Is not Justice just a nice way to say revenge.
wall simple vocabulary
Birdy never felt artistic inclination when armed with a marking implement. What came to her were words, always words, commentary and criticism and correction and simple vocabulary curios; she scratched a few of them on the smooth red wall.
real writing thinking
Writing is a completely private act. It's in a way like play but very serious play, and sometimes I can escape into the fictional world that I'm creating so fully as to see hours go by without my noticing it. I think that kind of suspension of time and that mindfulness is a real gift.
writing mind fiction
Fiction ought to announce the problems, dramatize the problems, display them. Yet offer no set answer. An answer would solve the mystery. Writing fiction, for me, is about putting on paper my obsessive interest in something mysterious. I may figure out the source of the mystery, the things that brought some action or image to my mind, but to make an equation of it would ruin the story.
going-away attention pay
There are a thousand things to hear about, informationally, daily, but the thing that doesn't go away is the one to pay attention to.
definitely domestic identified maybe mexico school
I definitely don't think of myself as someone identified by region. It's too far-flung a region, for starters, and southern New Mexico is very isolated. I wouldn't think of my identity as generational, either, but maybe as more stylistic, in the school of realism and domestic issues.