Ayana Mathis Quotes About Writing
-
I think of my success as a kind of fluke. How else could I possibly think of it? And although it's a banal thing to say, I wrote my book because I was writing my book. At first I didn't know I was writing it, and one of the amazing things that happened as I was putting sentences down on paper is that some of the things that are most sacred and important to me rose to the surface of the prose.
→ -
I started writing the book without realizing I was writing a book. That sounds stupid, but it's true. I'd been trying and failing to make a different manuscript work, and I thought I was just taking a break by writing some short stories. I'm not a very good short story writer - the amazing compression that is required for short stories doesn't come easily to me. But anyway, I thought I'd try to write some short stories. And a structure took shape - I stumbled upon it.
→ -
I've been writing all my life. Even though I didn't have sort of careerist aspirations as a writer, it was very much my identity.
→ -
I think a lot about race and the burdens of representation. There's an idea that because I'm writing a book set around the time of the Great Migration, and happen to be black, I'm trying to write a definitive account of the Great Migration, the so-called "black experience." That's not what I'm doing, and it can be frustrating.
→ -
You have to find a way of shutting the future out and focusing on the writing. One of the problems I'll have with writing my second book is getting back into a situation where I think about the words on the page rather than the publishing industry, or success, or any kind of readership I may now have. I'll have to do what writers do, which is focus on the story and nothing else.
→ -
I think that if you just write your characters you end up with something that people can access.
→ -
I couldn't imagine a book with many characters in it and one of them not being gay. It would have felt like a glaring and problematic omission for me. But I also wanted to write that character as a person, not just a gay person.
→ -
Fiction writing is an act of imagination, lived experience is secondary in many ways, writing a novel really is all about inventing worlds and people.
→ -
Even if you don't feel like sitting down to write or working on that big proposal, or whatever it is, just show up anyhow and the rest will follow.
→
Related Authors
-
Lan Samantha Chang Writer -
Joy Fielding Novelist -
Justin Torres Novelist -
Isabel Wilkerson Journalist -
Sister Souljah Author -
Paul Harding Musician -
Nell Freudenberger Novelist -
Melanie Benjamin Writer -
Maria Semple Novelist -
Tom Rath Author -
Chris Bohjalian Novelist -
Emily Raboteau Fiction writer -
Sue Monk Kidd Writer