My normal writing day involves three hours of actual writing, before noon, and the rest is just feeding the writing. There is teaching (so I can afford to write), travel to be planned and executed.
BONNIE JO CAMPBELLI always felt a weird obligation to be adventurous.
More Bonnie Jo Campbell Quotes
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I was never a big reader as a kid. My imagination wasn’t captured by books very often. It was captured more often by boys and partying and riding horses.
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You can’t beat a good sonnet, and you can write a sonnet without being married to the damned thing.
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I mostly write about the working poor. Somehow, they’re not being written about much anymore.
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My donkeys are Jack and Don Quixote. They’re very smart, very cautious. Much of what people consider stubbornness in donkeys is actually cautiousness.
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Since I’m living with the violence and trouble in my brain, it’s kind of a relief to write about it, to get it on paper, to put it in context, to find meaning in it.
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As a writer, I can live somewhat independently, occupying nooks and crannies and finding meaning there. I can even live in my mind a good portion of most days.
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In a regular class I don’t focus on the form, but I think that focus is helpful for brainstorming and coming up with ideas quickly, especially with autobiographical material.
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Where I live you’re not supposed to shoot a firearm within a quarter mile of a dwelling.
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It occurred to Susan that men were always waiting for something cataclysmic-love or war or a giant asteroid.
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The natural world is the place into which all my characters have to situate themselves in order to be who they really are, and that makes my rural fiction feel different from a lot of urban fiction.
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I figure that I’m always going to be fine, one way or another, but I do worry about other people who have difficulty moving from one world to the next. It’s the folks who are truly invested in their lives who have the hardest time with change.
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I realized that I was writing about folks with lots of skills, especially fix-it skills and survival skills, who were nonetheless not doing well in the new-millennium America.
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If you have someone falling out of the boat, you’d have to drag the boat up the river and film the same scene ten times, every time, dragging the boat exactly where it was up the river.
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I was just about to earn my Master’s along the way, but I knew something was wrong because I found myself crying all the time.
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I’m not much interested in my own self when I write. I’m interested in what I observe out there, what’s going on around me.
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A mathematical proof is beautiful, but when you’re finished, it’s really only about one thing. A story can be about many things.
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I think by writing about a place with great specificity, you manage to make it universal.
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I always felt a weird obligation to be adventurous.
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The great thing about fiction is that I don’t have to settle on an answer to any troubling question, or even a solution.
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Time is never wasted coming to an old man bar.
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Mostly the natural landscapes work as a sounding board for my characters, so they can understand themselves, and it acts as a mirror in which we readers see ourselves.
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When I was little, we lived on 8 acres and my mom had a horse. But when I was 7, my mom kicked my dad out, and then in order to feed us five kids, she got critters cheap or for free and raised them for food.
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I’m of the people in the bar and the people in my stories. They are my tribe.
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The truth is I tried to write for years and I wasn’t very good.
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After a year, it was great to get out of L.A. and return to Hyde Park. Since my grandparents lived in Hyde Park, I had been coming there since I was a tyke.
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Nobody tells young writers it’s okay if you’re not very good, you’ll get better. So I just thought I’m not very good, so I should try to do every other thing besides writing. That’s how I ended up being a hitchhiker, a world traveler, and a mathematician.
BONNIE JO CAMPBELL