Dana Spiotta
Dana Spiotta
Dana Spiottais an American author. Her novel Stone Arabiawas a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist. Her novel Eat the Documentwas a National Book Award finalist and won the Rosenthal Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her novel Lightning Fieldwas a New York Times Notable Book of the year. She was a recipient of the Rome Prize in Literature, a Guggenheim Fellowship and a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionAuthor
CountryUnited States of America
artist luck cost
Getting an audience requires luck as well as talent. Some artists are private and shy. It costs them too much.
writing laundry wells
I am a great procrastinator. When the writing is going really well, the laundry piles up.
memories dysfunction needs
Memory is not particularly linear - it is associative, repetitive, subjective and porous. But the writer needs to convey disorder and dysfunction without making the novel itself disorderly or dysfunctional.
giving-up wall mean
Occupy Wall Street means making Wall Street and the corporate power elite understand that the people affected by the binge of unregulated greed are not going away, and they are not going to give up.
issues choices desire
The issue isn't, Am I good enough? No. The issue is, Do I not have any other choice? Will and desire don't matter. Ability doesn't matter. Need is the only thing that matters.
coherence satisfaction authenticity
A good novel should be deeply unsettling - its satisfactions should come from its authenticity and its formal coherence. We must feel something crucial is at stake.
long lazy afternoon
We exist because of suburbia. Suburbia is a freak’s dreamworld, a world of extra rooms upstairs and long, lazy afternoons with no interference. A place where you can listen to your LPs for hours on end. You can live in your room, your own rent-free corner of the universe, and create a world of pleasure and interest entirely centered on yourself and your interior aesthetic and logic.
character past track
You are always working towards the moments in which characters experience reckonings or insight or change. I like to track them past those moments.
writing breathing order
In order to be a living, breathing thing, a novel has to be failed in some kind of way. Or at least that's how I keep writing them.
thinking ideas pay-the-price
The idea that you can live off the grid and just do your own thing is a very American idea - that you should be able to do your own thing, if you want to, if you're willing to pay the price for it. I think the price has gotten higher and higher.
art thinking self
People think it's suspect and self-indulgent to make art, and I don't think that's true. Some people think you should be busy making something that you can sell in the marketplace, and if nobody wants to buy it, it must be crap. And that's not true.
character want conflict
Usually there is a paradox in what a character wants. A conflict is built deeply within them. And then you put them in motion, throw everything at them until they reveal themselves further.
husband people creative
My husband is a musician. He cooks and he's a chef but he also, he makes basement recordings. So many people in my life make basement recordings, so I feel very lucky, I'm surrounded by very creative people.
art writing thinking
I think it's harder than ever to be an artist. I think that you end up, especially as a middle-aged person, you pay such big consequences for saying, 'I'm just going to devote my life to making art,' or 'I'm going to devote my life to writing novels.' You end up with no resources.