Janet Fitch
Janet Fitch
Janet Fitch is most famously known as the author of the Oprah's Book Club novel White Oleander, which became a film in 2002. She is a graduate of Reed College, located in Portland, Oregon...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionAuthor
Date of Birth9 November 1955
CountryUnited States of America
character emotional looks
Always tell us where we are. And don't just tell us where something is, make it pay off. Use description of landscape to help you establish the emotional tone of the scene. Keep notes of how other authors establish mood and foreshadow events by describing the world around the character. Look at the openings of Fitzgerald stories, and Graham Greene, they're great at this.
character unity goes-on
What is a scene? a) A scene starts and ends in one place at one time (the Aristotelian unities of time and place-this stuff goes waaaayyyy back). b) A scene starts in one place emotionally and ends in another place emotionally. Starts angry, ends embarrassed. Starts lovestruck, ends disgusted. c) Something happens in a scene, whereby the character cannot go back to the way things were before. Make sure to finish a scene before you go on to the next. Make something happen.
sending
I kept sending out stories and getting rejected.
fond los turns
I'm particularly fond of the Mulholland Fountain, at Riverside Drive and Los Feliz Boulevard, when it turns colors at night.
I never know how a novel is going to end, because you don't really know what's going to be at the bottom of a novel until you excavate it.
depths naked public
It's your flaws, not your strengths, that go down in the depths of your books. You're exposed, like dreaming you're naked in a public building.
anytime materials people showing work
Anytime you work with materials that are deep parts of yourself, you feel revulsion at showing things about yourself that you don't want people to know.
time
Dostoevsky was my literary idol for a long time.
los
Crime novelists do really well with Los Angeles.
authors describing emotional establish events mood notes tone
Use description of landscape to help you establish the emotional tone of the scene. Keep notes of how other authors establish mood and foreshadow events by describing the world around the character.
life realized spend
I started writing when I was 21. I was going to become an historian. And then I realized there was more to the world than just the past. I didn't want to spend my life in the library.
associate carol editor joyce send
I send all my short fiction to 'Ontario Review' because Joyce Carol Oates is associate editor there, and I think she's fantastic.
angeles came figure fill five home los mother people politics talking time
A figure in Los Angeles politics for five decades, my mother nevertheless had had her fill of talking to people by the time she came home at night.
A novelist can get by on story, but the poet has nothing but the words.