Tobias Wolff
Tobias Wolff
Tobias Jonathan Ansell Wolffis an American short story writer, memoirist, and novelist. He is known for his memoirs, particularly This Boy's Lifeand In Pharaoh's Army. He has written two novels, including The Barracks Thief, which won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, and an array of short stories. Wolff received a National Medal of Arts from President Barack Obama in September 2015...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth19 June 1945
CityBirmingham, AL
CountryUnited States of America
The reader really has to step up to the plate and read a short story.
A novel invites digression and a little relaxation of the grip because a reader can't endure being held that tightly in hand for so long a time.
That, for me, is a very important test of a young writer's commitment because most of them are going to have to continue doing that when they've finished the program.
Of course it's why you want to become a writer - because you have the liberty to do that, but once you have the liberty you also have the obligation to do it.
Because the more you write the more you're aware of the weight of your tradition and the difficulties of the form and the more you have already done that you do not want to do again.
Anybody can be very destructive in that position without at all meaning to be, and I know that I have been inadvertently destructive in the past for certain people on certain occasions.
And you can tell the writers who do it - Robert Stone, for example, who with each new novel is doing something new. I appreciate that in other writers.
Most of us don't live lives that lend themselves to novelistic expression, because our lives are so fragmented.
The short story, on the other hand, is the perfect American form.
When I was about 14 or 15 I decided to become a writer and never for a moment since have I wanted to do anything else.
So you're continually searching for new ways of using the story form to most perfectly contain and express the story you're telling.
I have to be honest, of course, but I have to be sure that my honesty comes in a form that is not destructive because it can very easily become so.
I'm very conscious of working from memory but I also know that someone else who was there at the same moment would write something different about it.
I have never been able to understand the complaint that a story is "depressing" because of its subject matter. What depresses me are stories that don't seem to know these things go on, or hide them in resolute chipperness; "witty stories," in which every problem is the occasion for a joke; "upbeat" stories that flog you with transcendence. Please. We're grown ups now.