Jennifer Konner Quotes

I started creative writing classes at Aberdeen Central Library, and the writer-in-residence there, Todd McEwen, encouraged me a great deal. He showed my stories to his editor, and I thought that was just what happened to everyone who took his classes!

I think that, in principle, a workshop is such a beautiful idea - an environment in which writers who are collectively apprenticed to the craft of writing can come together in order to collectively improve.

For everyone I know who is a writer, there was some awkward time in their lives when they had to learn to call themselves one.

My own life has been doubly disconnected, as I've written books under two different names. As an author, your name almost becomes a brand; readers know what to expect.

I did not set out to write another novel. One day I sat down with the thought of trying my hand at a piece of nonfiction, a personal memoir of youth, but over the next several weeks, without intending it, the work began evolving into what has become 'Tomcat in Love.'

I'm not really an autobiographical writer, though I use lots of stuff from my life to make my stories seem real. But when I actually write about myself, I get very confused.

I believe I'm a better writer now than I was when I started. I'm grateful that I had good guidance because you don't make it in this business without good editors and a lot of support from your publishers.

Like most writers, I write about what has happened to me as that involves the minimum amount of research.

In today's time, writing stuff that actually happened is touch-and-go, because you don't want to be too personal. If you are, then it probably won't relate to a mass audience. A lot of times you have to make it sound like it's about everybody else, but you really went through it.

I've met many, many writers who say they would never write about their family, never write about people they did not totally make up. But that is not the composition of my character.

I think it's nearly impossible to write something fictional without having it be about yourself in some way or another.

The Longstockings are eight children's and young adult writers. We all came out of the New School MFA program, and we meet regularly to critique each other's work.

It's exhausting writing nonfiction, particularly when it's personal. It's tiring, always speaking about things that are not necessarily fun retelling.

I can write with authority only about what I know well, which means that I end up using surface details of my own life in my fiction.

It is so common to write autobiographical fiction in which your own experience is thinly disguised.

I was studying with Peter Carey, Colum McCann; but also, my fellow students were really critical readers for me.

For years, I felt I was a novelist, but now I know I can write short fiction.

I am at my worst trying to write about things that overlap with my life.

I'm not a writing group member, not a joiner in that way. I don't seek a wide swath of feedback.

At risk of sounding foully pompous I think that writers' groups are probably very useful at the beginning of a writing career.

When you start writing about the stuff that is the central experience of your own life, you can talk about whatever you want, in whatever way you want.

I don't write autobiographically.

Personal narrative is one of the few things where people don't get caught up in fighting over esoteric rhetoric.

Writing with other people is absolutely delightful. It's social, which a writer doesn't usually get to do.

When I write for myself, I think about myself and draw from my own experience.