The happiest she'd ever been was with him, and the saddest. Was that the true test of love?
Local teenagers killed in a car crash is a suburban legend, a stock plot line.
The two hardest things about writing are starting and not stopping.
You can't run from your roots.
When I'm writing, I try to have the mask of my character on as I'm walking through the world. When I'm not at my desk, the rest of the time, I try to stay in that character and see the world the way that character would It's almost like method acting in a way — keeping the character close the way the actor keeps a script close and always tries to be in character.
I'm not sure the risks I take are any different from what other writers take, since we all serve at the pleasure of the reader.
Saul Bellow once said, 'A writer is a reader who has moved to emulation' — which I think is true. I just started writing and made that jump from reader to writer and learned how hard it was, but also how much fun it was — losing myself in these imaginary worlds.
Growing up in the '60s and early '70s, with the space flight and the Apollo program, I always loved planes. I always loved rockets and I always loved space travel.
When I'm writing, I try to have the mask of my character on as I'm walking through the world.
As a fiction writer, my favorite tools are my imagination and the peculiar opportunities offered by different points of view.
If there is an audience out there for me, I want them to be surprised when the next book comes out.
I like the idea of being a working writer, not of saying that it's going to take me 30 years to write my magnum opus.
My main question that I ask of my characters is, 'What does it feel like to be you? And how do you get through the day? Where do you find the hope and faith to endure getting through the days, and what are your days like?'
I always squirm when I read what's called 'creative nonfiction,' and the writer is lobbing gobs of emotion and language at the world, hoping some of it will stick.
No one writes a great book every time out, or even a good book.
The story is always in service to the characters, and is only as long or short, or neat or ragged as it needs to be.
I've always been a big reader.
I don't like coming home. It keeps me from being nostalgic, which by nature I am. Even before the plane begins its descent, I find myself dreading the questions left unanswered by my childhood.
The sins of the Midwest: flatness, emptiness, a necessary acceptance of the familiar. Where is the romance in being buried alive? In growing old?
You couldn't relive your life, skipping the awful parts, without losing what made it worthwhile. You had to accept it as a whole--like the world, or the person you loved.
Getting inside your character's head and letting the reader see the world through not just their eyes but their sensibility creates an intimacy that can't be duplicated in any other medium.
The spirit of Jane Eyre looms over Once Upon a Day. Lisa Tucker keeps the plot of this gothic novel bubbling with tons of juicy family secrets.
It is not brilliance or facility that is necessary, but the determination to bear and even enjoy the dull process of wading into one's own bad prose again, and one more time, and then once again, with the utmost concentration and taste, looking for opportunities to mine deeper.
To be lost and forgotten-to be abandoned-is a shared and terrible fear, just as our fondest hope, as we grow older, is that we might leave some parts of us behind in the hearts of those we love and in that way live on.
All stories teach us something, and promise us something, whether they're true or invented, legend or fact.
Stewart O'Nan is an American novelist.
