When I say I’m instinctive [in writing], I do feel like I need to hide what I’m doing from myself. My mind just needs to be able to operate untrammeled.
Beginning with Julio’s birth in 1900 and ending with his death in 2000, the graphic novel touches on most of the major events that shaped the 20th century.
Reading like a cross between Samuel Beckett’s ‘The Calmative’ and Gordon Lish’s Dear Mr. Capote, Robert Lopez’s new novel gets under your skin and latches on.
Like a cross between Paul Auster’s The Book of Illusions and Janice Lee’s Damnation, The Absolution of Roberto Acestes Laing is at once smart and slyly unsettling.
Sometimes I start with the mood, but sometimes I just try to work toward discovering it. But I do think often there’s a mood or unsettling quality, in which the reality of the world seems to be taken away, that I really love, and it’s something that I almost always unconsciously move toward.
I read individual stories a lot in magazines and other places, too, but I really think there’s something to be said for reading story collections as collections. That’s not true of all story collections, to be honest, but for good ones I think it often is true.
Ideas for stories come in really different terms and really different ways for me. Sometimes they’re from books, sometimes they’re just kind of out of the air, from nowhere, sometimes they’re biographical, or sometimes they’re other things [everyday life].
I don’t think that writing, real writing, has much to do with affirming belief–if anything it causes rifts and gaps in belief which make belief more complex and more textured, more real.
One of the primary differences for me between fiction and poetry is that fiction uses every sort of tool that poetry does but hides it much, much more. Fiction doesn’t necessarily reveal what it’s doing with rhythm and sound and patterning.
![Brian Evenson Quote - When I say I’m instinctive [in writing], I do feel like I need to hide what I’m doing from myself. My mind just needs to be able to operate untrammeled.](https://minimalistquotes.com/images/when-i-say-im-instinctive-in-writing-i-do-feel-lik.jpg)
![Brian Evenson Quote - Ideas for stories come in really different terms and really different ways for me. Sometimes they’re from books, sometimes they’re just kind of out of the air, from nowhere, sometimes they’re biographical, or sometimes they’re other things [everyday life].](https://minimalistquotes.com/images/ideas-for-stories-come-in-really-different-terms-a.jpg)
