Donald Ray Pollock Quotes

I've tried to write deep and serious. I spent years working to write a story that would make my writing group cry.

I started a novel back in high school. It wasn't very good. It was the opposite of good. The writing itself wasn't too bad, and the characters were interesting. But the story was a mess, and it was full of fantasy cliches. Dwarf with an axe. Barbarian warrior. I don't ever think I'd bother finishing that. It's just not worth my time.

My first attempt at writing a novel was horrible. I had to throw it away. But I stuck with the idea, which is what became 'The Invisible Circus.'

I'm a great believer in the novelist being 'on the scene,' reporting, traveling, meeting all sorts of people.

It's easier to cast yourself in something you've written because you know your voice.

For me, the easiest thing to figure out is the story I want to tell, and the hardest thing is to figure out the voice that's gonna tell it. And that's why I finish very little.

The characters in a novel are made up, figments of the writer's imagination. I'm sure this won't come as a surprise to anyone, and it's not surprising to me either, but knowing this, feeling this, definitely made writing my second book harder.

All a writer's characters are imaginary, no matter whether they are based on real people or not. They are people as one imagines them to be.

I love the idea of directing, I'm not confident enough, but I'm more confident in, well, I'd love to write. I've sort of written my whole life and I think I have a knack for it, so I'd like to write something and see what people think and that would be my first step to directing.

Make them do as you want them to," she said. "I can’t," mourned Anne. "Averil is such an unmanageable heroine. She will do and say things I never meant her to. Then that spoils everything that went before and I have to write it all over again.

Then I decided I would spend the summer writing a novel. That would fix a lot of people.

A novelist is a person who lives in other people's skins.

I do write a lot of prose. It's not disciplined enough yet that it's actually become stories, or short stories. The idea of writing a novel seems impossible.

I hear people talk in my head and I write it down. I choose where they live and how they dress to be real. That person wouldn't wear that. That person wouldn't say that. She can't afford to live like that. All that bullshit that so many movies have in them. I don't want to see that.

If you want anybody to have a different voice, you really have to visualize and hear the voices of all these people. Sometimes when I write with specific actors in mind, it helps.

The more fiction you read and write, the more you'll find your paragraphs forming on their own.

You learn to write by writing, and by reading and thinking about how writers have created their characters and invented their stories. If you are not a reader, don't even think about being a writer.

I write what needs to be written the way that seems genuinely right. If what comes out of it are stories, then it is my vocation to believe in them and in the fact that they'll interest people and maybe affect their lives.

I very much write from characters. Those people start speaking, and then I have them in the house with me and I live with them. Then at some point, it's time to get them out of the house. You can only live with someone like Dr. Georgeous Teitelbaum from THE SISTERS ROSENSWEIG for so long, and then it's time for her to go. But it is very like having the company of these people and trying to craft them in some way into a story.

When you write a novel, you make other people see your imaginary friends.

Writing is hard work, and if anything's true about the process, it's that fact that a good story is hard to find and even trickier to get on paper. What's less romantic than staring alone at a blank screen? And edgy? I've changed the cat little because I didn't know what my characters were going to say next.

I often have to write a hundred pages or more before there's a paragraph that's alive.

Here's what I love: I love sitting at my desk, staring at the blank screen, and beginning that conversation with my imaginary friends.

I'd like to know what I could do if I really had the time to spend on writing a book, with no columns or shows to do at the same time.

Of course, I write. I have stories to tell. But I don't want to do superficial stuff any more.