Ma's still nodding. "You're the one who matters, though. Just you." I shake my head till it's wobbling because there's no just me.
Emma DonoghueRead
The great thing about a short story is that it doesn't have to trawl through someone's whole life; it can come in glancingly from the side.
Interpretation
Short stories focus on concise narratives without the need for extensive background.
This quote highlights the unique quality of short stories, which allows them to deliver impactful narratives without requiring an exhaustive exploration of a character's entire life. Instead, they can convey profound insights or emotions through brief, focused glimpses, illustrating the power of brevity in storytelling.
In practice
In a literature class when discussing the impact of short narratives.
Ma's still nodding. "You're the one who matters, though. Just you." I shake my head till it's wobbling because there's no just me.
Ah yes, the paradox of publicity is that even as we do it, we know it's killing off the chance of another reader happening across our book in the ideal state of innocence.
At the door, there was one of those moment when two people realize that they like each other more than they know each other. This is nicer than the opposite situation, but more awkward. You try to remember the protocol for touching. You hate to gush, or presume to much, yet you are unwilling to let the moment pass without without some gesture
You cannot predict literary success; the only way you can possibly aim for it is to do your thing and do it well.
Books are the air I breathe, so I don't notice the seasons.
Writing stories is my way of scratching that itch: my escape from the claustrophobia of individuality. It lets me, at least for a while, live more than one life, walk more than one path. Reading, of course, can do the same.
It is clear that the books owned the shop rather than the other way about. Everywhere they had run wild and taken possession of their habitat, breeding and multiplying, and clearly lacking any strong hand to keep them down.
Back in my 20s, when I wrote 'A Place of Greater Safety,' the French Revolution novel, I thought, 'I'll always have to write historical novels because I can't do plots.'' But in the six years of writing that novel, I actually learned to write, to invent things.
What I felt was, if you spend your life just writing fiction, you are going to falsify your material. And the fictional form was going to force you to do things with the material, to dramatize it in a certain way. I thought nonfiction gave one a chance to explore the world, the other world, the world that one didn't know fully.
At the time I was growing up, literature was involved with the so-called confessional poets. And I was not interested in that. I did not think that specific and personal perspective functioned well for the reader at all.
My books never go where I think they're going.
Mr. Wodehouse's idyllic world can never stale. He will continue to release future generations from captivity that may be more irksome than our own. He has made a world for us to live in and delight in.
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