I started out as a poet who primarily wanted to write about image and moment. Over the years I've been trying to teach myself how to do plot and scene. My first story collection had the most issues with the plotlessness, and when I was writing my second collection I was teaching myself how to make things happen.
I'm pretty excited for people to listen to the story of each song. It's definitely like a giant book with different stories in it. They are all very child-like but also a balance between light and dark.
I love people. Everybody. I love them, I think, as a stamp collector loves his collection. Every story, every incident, every bit of conversation is raw material for me.
Science is a collection of stories, linking characters worthy of notice.
I'd love to do a whole series of stories and have them collected into books.
The book that first made me want to be a writer is Flannery O'Connor's short story collection 'A Good Man Is Hard To Find.'
But what I did think would be interesting is if we created a fictitious story of our own, and then took these stories that we had collected and assigned them to characters who would be played by actors.
I'm looking for human stories to do.
We all love to hear a good story. We save our stories in books. We save our books in libraries. Libraries are the storyhouses full of all those stories and secrets.
Writers collect stories of rituals: John Cheever putting on a jacket and tie to go down to the basement, where he kept a desk near the boiler room. Keats buttoning up his clean white shirt to write in, after work.
'Drown' was always a hybrid book. It's connected stories - partially a story collection but partially a novel. I always wanted the reader to decide which genre they thought the book belonged to more - story, novel, neither, both.
A short story collection can be as exciting as a novel. It is a real complete experience, like when you listen to a real good recording, a Beatles record, and there are so many good songs.
I got around a lot, and lots of people talked to me. I salted down stories by the barrel load.
Many critics, when trying to praise a short-story collection, will say that it has the heft and scope of a good novel. But for me, one of the highest compliments you can pay a novel is to say that it has the rich texture and eloquent detail of a good story collection.
Alf Wight was first and foremost a great storyteller. From all the interesting people Alf had spoken to from all over the country, particularly vets, Alf wrote their stories down.
I've just finished my next collection, Possible Side Effects, and I'm now working on a collection of holiday stories as well as a memoir about my relationship with my father.
Online publication is fine with me, in part because I hope to collect those stories later.
'Slumdog Millionaire' is a fairy tale, but it starts in a place you really believe, and that came from spending two months wandering around the slums picking up stories and talking to people.
I lived in Boston for three years, and during that time, I wrote my first collection of stories, 'What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us;' other stories that didn't make it into the collection; and several failed novel openings.
I'm trying to create a collection of stories - the 'U.F.O.W.A.V.E.' songs are all stories. I haven't really taken direct lyrical influence from other songwriters, but my dad bought me a book of W.H. Auden's poems when I was younger, and the imagery really interested me.
I wrote my first two long novels and an anthology of short narratives, when I was a manager of my own jazz bar. There was not enough time to write and I didn't know how to write novels. Therefore, I made written collages of aphorisms and rags.
When you write fiction, you're like a bird making a nest. You remember every little story ever told you. It's funny how things come back to you.
I fill up the well of stories in my head - without ever knowing I'm doing it.
I had no idea Savage Season was the beginning of a series. I wrote the second one about three years later. The character of Hap wouldn't stop talking to me, and then there was a third, and over the years nine novels and a collection of stories and some uncollected stories.
I'd like to find great stories from as many parts of the world as possible.
