As a teacher, I can help my students see what is working and not working. I can show them certain solutions.
AKHIL SHARMAI realized that he was writing about good people doing good things. This did not match my experience of life and so I found my sentences stretching and becoming less plain.
More Akhil Sharma Quotes
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Ernest Hemingway has been the most important influence on me as a writer. But at a certain point as a writer,
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Also, I have to assume that readers are sophisticated enough to know that not every person in a community is the same, and so there are many people who would not force an abortion just because a fetus is female.
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If anybody reads an Indian newspaper, all these things are obvious, and so I am not breaking news. All I am doing is representing my community as it actually is.
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Novels should be judged rigorously. Either a book works or it doesn’t. The fact that something is true in the real world should not lend authority to it in fiction.
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The little babies are missing their families from their past lives.
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I tend to think that we are all pretty much alike. We all feel despair. We all have problems with relationships.
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People often need to describe things quickly and so they use a shorthand. The problem is that after they use a label, they begin to think only in terms of the label instead of the totality of the experience a novel provides.
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I need to tell the things that are important but which don’t make sense in terms of the narrative, things that would destroy symmetry or narrative pace. This is my personal belief about what it means to write nonfiction.
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Money is part of how we move through the world, what stores and restaurants we go into, whether we take a train to the airport or a taxi. Describing characters living in the real world requires describing them engaging with money.
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Why do people always think hurting others is all right, as long as they hurt themselves as well?
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Even within my stories, people hold opposing views.
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Exposition suggests a great trust in the reader, and this expression of trust makes a book feel tender.
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When someone gets a success, and we, too, have done good work and sometimes even better work than the person who has just triumphed, we wonder: Why did success pass me by?
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The tears loosen their memories so they can slide away. They cry at the life they have lost, and then they cry at everything they’ll forget.
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It is hard to write about physically difficult things without causing the reader to disengage.
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