I’m very interested in people who are in a situation that needs a little puzzling out. The thing that gets me started on a story is a person in a tough situation.
BONNIE JO CAMPBELLDrugs and drinking affect every family I know, country and city, middle-class and poor.
More Bonnie Jo Campbell Quotes
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I mostly write about the working poor. Somehow, they’re not being written about much anymore.
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I loved writing for the school newspaper. I liked to report and interview people, but I really liked to write columns, funny columns.
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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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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.
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Drugs and drinking affect every family I know, country and city, middle-class and poor.
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We all screw up, but the women I write about don’t have back-up plans or money in the back or resources to fix what they have broken.
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I thought that you had to learn to write by yourself and if you couldn’t do it, then you were out of luck.
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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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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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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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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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Men didn’t understand that you couldn’t let yourself be consumed with passion when there were so many people needing your attention, when there was so much work to do.
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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 have a second-degree black belt in Okinawan kobudo weapons training.
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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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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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A Life in Men is a joyful, ambitious novel that is also an adventure traversing three continents, as well as a meditation on love, sex, and, most important, friendship, which can overcome time, distance, and even death.
BONNIE JO CAMPBELL -
We know that we need to explore desire in fiction – many say that the only way a story exists is that a character feels a strong desire – and nature is the place where creatures act on their desires in the most pure way imaginable.
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Being five-foot-ten at fourteen years old was a little bit scary.
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In fact, when I finally realized I was really going to write, when I was about thirty-four, I was working on my Ph.D. in Mathematics.
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So maybe nature also works as a metaphor for whatever emotional troubles my characters have to negotiate. I’m interested in my characters as survivors, and maybe that works best when the old-fashioned notion of humans surviving in wilderness is not too far away.
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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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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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Writing is so wrapped up in ego, but with math one is just trying to get it right, although you’re often wrong. I think math helped me become a good critic of myself, come at writing a little less personally.
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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.
BONNIE JO CAMPBELL