Jess Walter
Jess Walter
Jess Walteris an American author of six novels, a collection of short stories, and a non-fiction book. His books have been published in twenty-six countries and translated into twenty-eight languages. He is the recipient of the Edgar Allan Poe Award, among others, and was a finalist for the National Book Award in 2006...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionAuthor
Date of Birth20 July 1965
CountryUnited States of America
corners energies figure throwing ultimately various
Ultimately if you're a journalist, one day you're writing about figure skating, one day a political debate. I loved that about reporting. I like throwing my energies into various corners of the world.
Often, the fact that I haven't done something as a writer is all the reason I need to try it.
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I think celebrity has become almost normalized. I feel like we all live our lives in a pale imitation of celebrity. With Facebook, we choose a photo that is not too good a photo - we're more arch than that. We're our own celebrity publicists. We understand it so innately.
assign cops criminals genre itself minority spies stories suppose suspense
I think suspense should be like any other color on a writer's palette. I suppose I'm in the minority but I think it's crazy for 'literary fiction' to divorce itself from stories that are suspenseful, and assign anything with cops or spies or criminals to some genre ghetto.
criticism dominant essays form love movies poetry television time
For me, movies and television are interesting because they are the dominant storytelling form of our time. My first love will always be fiction, and especially novels, but I'm a writer... I write poetry and essays and criticism and I'd love to write a whole play, and sometimes I even write scripts.
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My writing regimen is not very regimented. I tend to be a binge writer, working sometimes in the morning and sometimes all night. When I get going I like to hunch over the keyboard until I feel totally played out.
poetry
My poetry is the most disappointing thing for me that I've ever written. When I say I can write everything, I don't say I can write everything well.
My poems... the ones that start out as jokes become these big ponderous things and the ones that start out ponderous devolve into jokes.
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I tend to like the last sentence I just wrote, which is: 'It was late in the fall and the trees lining our driveway had turned red like a row of burning matches.'
outside picture time
I remember the first time I went to Europe, I had someone take a picture of me there, so I could really see myself there. There's a sense of being outside yourself, and I think celebrity allows us that too, to be outside ourselves.
became dad detour developing except funny gone kid newspaper route step support work
I probably would have gone the M.F.A. route except I was a dad at 19, and it made more sense to go to work for a newspaper and support a kid that way. But the funny thing is, that detour became the most important step in my developing as a novelist.
subject
I'm a writer, and the subject is less important than the act of writing itself.
create desire hero myth perverse pure triumphant victim wake
There was a real conflation of hero and victim in the wake of 9/11, in our perverse desire to create a triumphant myth out of pure tragedy.
together movement kind
You probably have to trust that your work is following certain themes and certain movements, but then the rest is a kind of piecing together so that the whole becomes larger than the parts.