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Teaching is all armchair. I learn about writing by writing and thinking about what I’ve written and throwing it away.

Ben Marcus

Mostly we’re motivated to control ourselves in public. Mostly. At home the motivation is much less clear. At home there’s a bit of a lab for bad behavior.
BEN MARCUS

Home Labs Motivation
I love the way dates in a text make us think that truth will follow.
BEN MARCUS

Follow Thinking Truth Way
I’m interested in the hope we invest in science, and the disappointment we can feel when science flattens, or ‘explains,’ the larger mysteries of religion.
BEN MARCUS

Disappointment Feels Mystery
In some sense, prose fiction is just a way of unlocking a space. If I can unlock the space, it comes out and it’s vivid, I find that I care about it, and it’s part of me.
BEN MARCUS

Care Fiction Space
I like big doses of grief when I read: Richard Yates, Flannery O’Connor, Kenzabaro Oe, Thomas Bernhard.
BEN MARCUS

Bigs Dose Grief
Slamming the book shut produces a wind on the face, a weather that is copyrighted by the author, and this wind may not be deployed without permission, nor may the pages be turned without express written permission.
BEN MARCUS

Book Copyright Permisson Weather Wind
My parents showed me by example that they could balance their work and family lives.
BEN MARCUS

Balance Example Parent
I’m attracted to how fraught the parent-child relationship is, swerving so easily between love and hostility, with almost no plausible way to end, unless someone dies.
BEN MARCUS

Children Parent Way
Suspense left my life a long time ago, now it has returned. I do not care for it.
BEN MARCUS

Care Long Suspense
Judaism to me, as badly as I practiced it, what I’ve always loved about it was its total embrace of complexity, its admission of unknowability.
BEN MARCUS

Complexity Embrace Judaism
Rain is used as white noise when God is disgusted by too much prayer, when the sky is stuffed to bursting with the noise of what people need.
BEN MARCUS

Prayer Rain Sky
My goal, with whatever I’m working on, is to lose track of time.
BEN MARCUS

Goal Loses Track
Fiction is too complicated and too elusive to break down into a set of tricks.
BEN MARCUS

Breaking Complicated Down Fiction
When I started writing at 18 or 19, I had a fear of anything autobiographical, but I’ve come to realise that my writing is very autobiographical at the emotional level.
BEN MARCUS

Emotional Level Writing
The context of what can be known establishes that love and indifference are forms of language, but the wise addition of punctuation allows us to believe that there are other harms – the dash gives the reader the clear signal they are coming.
BEN MARCUS

Believe Dash Establish Indifference Language Love Wise
The common, the quotidian, is so much more unyielding to me, really stubborn and hard to work with, and I like this because it makes me think and it makes me worry. I can’t just plunge my hand into the meat of it. I need new approaches.
BEN MARCUS

Hands Thinking Worry

Teaching is all armchair. I learn about writing by writing and thinking about what I’ve written and throwing it away.

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Teaching is all armchair. I learn about writing by writing and thinking about what I’ve written and throwing it away.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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