Chad Harbach
Chad Harbach
Chad Harbachis an American writer. An editor at the journal n + 1, he is the author of the 2011 novel The Art of Fielding...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionWriter
CountryUnited States of America
reading writing thinking
The effects of MFA programs, and the rise of creative writing instruction more generally, are far more diffuse than people think. Even if you're a writer who has avoided institutions your whole life, you're still going to be reading a lot of writers who have MFAs, and are affiliated with universities.
book thinking people
If you're part of any kind of writerly community, some of those people will have gone through MFA programs, and their thinking leaks into yours. So whatever changes MFAs have made to the culture, it's to the culture as a whole. It can't be pinned down to individual books in a way that some people would like to do.
new-york nice ambition
A lot of writers choose to live in New York, partly because of the literary culture here, and partly because Brooklyn's a pretty nice place to live. And a lot of writers who might not geographically reside in New York still point their ambitions towards New York in some sense.
doors feet people
Getting your foot in the door with some publishing people can be important when you're starting out as a writer, but it's also not enough to get you where you need to be.
achieve novel
Somehow, you can achieve a directness in the novel that you can't get anywhere else.
fun book writing
It is no fun at all to have been writing a book for seven or so years, especially when you've never published anything before.
kindness infinite chekhov
There are no whys in a person's life, and very few hows. In the end, in search of useful wisdom, you could only come back to the most hackneyed concepts, like kindness, forbearance, infinite patience. Solomon and Lincoln: This too shall pass. Damn right it will. Or Chekhov: Nothing passes. Equally true.
sports player guy
He already knew he could coach. All you had to do was look at each of your players and ask yourself: What story does this guy wish someone would tell him about himself? And then you told the guy that story.
You are skilled. I exhort you.
book fighting years
I sold a book six years after I left an MFA program. In between, there was a lot of endurance of poverty and a lot of fighting off doubt. It's all a part of the process of being or becoming a writer.
It remained an open question, how much sympathy love could stand.
fiction different process
Fiction and nonfiction, for me, involve very different processes.
real people world
Tall people have a real advantage in the world.
girl school striving-to-be-the-best
Every dude in your high school wasn't striving to be the best poet because then he'd get all the girls, right? But you could imagine a society in which that were the case.