Zitat des Tages von Molly Antopol:
One of the main reasons I write fiction is to try to understand what life is like for people other than myself, to try to see the world through my characters' eyes. I often find that I'm able to understand certain emotional truths about my own life by exploring things from different vantages.
I've always loved short stories. Even before I was a writer, I was reading short stories - there were certain writers where I just felt like they could do in a short story what so many writers needed a whole novel to do, and that was really inspiring to me.
In a sense, any story that anyone writes is going to be autobiographical - whether it deals directly with the author's experience or not - because it captures what we're obsessed with while working on that particular piece.
I like that it's challenging - that when I'm writing, I feel as if I'm pouring everything I have into the story until there's nothing left and I have to begin thinking about a new world and set of circumstances to research and explore.
In terms of the Eastern Europe stories, my family is originally from there; even as a kid, it was the Russian writers I loved most, and I've spent a substantial amount of time there myself, traveling and on research grants.
I love being in the archives, traveling, sitting in dusty places and looking at books with brittle pages. I love reading biographies and researching, to make myself informed about whatever political or historical time I'm writing about. From there, a lot of the emotional truths about my characters emerge.
I always tell my students to seek out other writers as models, and though it took me years to heed my own advice, it really was life-altering when I found writers who wrote long stories, full of back story and side plots and sub-histories.
I really look up to writers who are able to write compressed, single-scene stories, where everything happens in a kitchen. But I just can't think that way. For me it would be impossible to write a story where I didn't know what someone's parents did and what their grandparents did and who they used to date.
As a fiction writer, all I need is a laptop, and when I'm not teaching, I travel as much as I can, applying for every research grant and overseas gig I hear of, then trying to extend those trips as far as the stipends will go. I love to travel alone.
I never thought about what I would write. I just come from such a big family of storytellers.
I've always been fascinated by family ancestry.
Writing a story is pretty all-consuming for me - it feels a lot like method acting, and for the eight or twelve or fifteen months that I'm working on a story, I'm constantly thinking about how my narrator would react to whatever tangled situation I'm in.
I'd be lying if I said that any part of writing is easy for me, but I have always found that setting comes more naturally to me than, say, writing action scenes.
I've never believed it's a fiction writer's job to create an exact replica of the past, a diorama the reader can step right into. But it is my responsibility to learn everything of the world I'm writing about, to become an expert in the politics and history that formed my characters' identities.
I come from a big family of storytellers and, growing up, I liked hearing about the years before I was born.
All the stories in 'The UnAmericans' required interviews, travel, hours and hours in the archives. All of that stuff is so important in the beginning, but I reach a point where I have to shuck it away.