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
writing years risk
The writer has to take risks and go somewhere full of mystery and possibility for the novel to deepen over the years it takes to write it.
believe character writing
I do want to write about social/cultural/historical context. I'm interested in relationships, in character, but within a specific social context. Which is kind of a political thing, I admit that. But it's what I'm interested in, and it's how I believe human behavior is legible.
real writing character
If you directly try to write about an idea, it will never be what you imagined. But if you're imagining through the building of sentences, through the characters, and paying attention to avoid ease and comfort yet still thinking about making the sentences work, you will get a shot at some real interesting stuff.
moving writing thinking
For me writing is an organic process that starts with engaging the language and then thinking about the structure of the novel as you move along. Especially in revision you start to notice correlations. Things come up, not self-consciously, because you're busy feeling your way through sentences and trying to push the language into new places.
writing want strange
I want what I write to be deeply engaging and strange and true.
character writing voice
When I write characters, I need to hear their voice. As soon as I get them speaking, and I feel how they use language, I understand who they are and what they want.
morning writing thinking
I think most writers have to have a practice of writing. For me it is very early in the morning. I try to make it a separate world from the rest of my life.
writing laundry wells
I am a great procrastinator. When the writing is going really well, the laundry piles up.
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.
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.
writing character emotional
I think there's a false division people sometimes make in describing literary novels, where there are people who write systems novels, or novels of ideas, and there are people who write about emotional things in which the movement is character driven. But no good novels are divisible in that way.
writing technology trying
I try to write about how we live today, how we use language, technology, our bodies.
writing long novel
It takes a long time to write a novel when you have to keep interrupting your work to earn money.
teaching thinking giving
My teaching forces me to articulate what I think works in a piece of fiction and how I think it works. All of that gives me energy as a writer.