Richard Russo
Richard Russo
Richard Russois an American novelist, short story writer, screenwriter, and teacher...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth15 July 1949
CountryUnited States of America
writing order trying
You just kind of have faith. If that sounds kind of mystical, it's because I really don't know how it works, but I trust that it does. I try to write the way I read, in order to find out what happens next.
dad book years
My dad had this rock hard body and would work 12- to 13-hour days. The guys he worked with were scrap-iron guys. Nobody on that road crew had read a book in 10 years, but there was something about the way they lived I really admired.
structure
Structure is one of the things that I always hope will reveal itself to me.
book thinking trying
I want that which is hilarious and that which is heartbreaking to occupy the same territory in the book because I think they very often occupy the same territory in life, much as we try to separate them.
believe past thinking
Were it not for Occam's Razor, which always demands simplicity, I'd be tempted to believe that human beings are more influenced by distant causes than immediate ones. This would especially be true of overeducated people, who are capable of thinking past the immediate, of becoming obsessed by the remote. It's the old stuff, the conflicts we've never come to terms with, that sneaks up on us, half forgotten, insisting upon action.
nice thinking long
One of the nice things about our marriage, at least to my way of thinking, is that my wife and I no longer have to argue every thing through. We each know what the other will say, and so the saying becomes an unnecessary formality. No doubt some marriage counselor would explain to us that our problem is a failure to communicate, but to my way of thinking we've worked long and hard to achieve this silence, Lily's and mine, so fraught with mutual understanding.
smart ambitious safe
Steve Yarbrough's Safe from the Neighbors will take your breath away. Ambitious, funny, sad, smart, and beautifully crafted, it's everything a novel should be.
writing america interesting
By ignoring a lot of American culture you can write more interesting stories. Unfortunately, if you were writing about America as it is, you'd be writing about a lot of people sitting in front of television sets.
heart knives hilarity
... Baggott enjoys living on the knife edge between hilarity and heartbreak and that makes her a writer after my own heart.
trying knows ifs
When you don't know what to do, try something; if that doesn't work, try something else.
adventure middle middle-ground
Where was the middle ground between a sense of adventure and just plain sense?
tasks overwhelming smallest
Whatever you're working on, take small bites. The task will not be overwhelming if you can reduce it to its smallest component.
skills information grids
To weigh and evaluate a vast grid of information, much of it meaningless, and to arrive at sensible, if erroneous, conclusions, is a skill not to be sneezed at.
children writing views
Not everyone writes well from a child's point of view.