In Minneapolis, I learned that there are more theaters per square mile than in any U.S. city but New York, and we also had great Midwestern beef in our salads in a plaza overlooking the national headquarters of Target, Inc. – Darin Strauss
I’m no fan of jam bands. You can take your Gov’t Mule, your Phish, your Rusted Root. But Derek Trucks is a special musician – perhaps the greatest slide guitarist who ever lived. – Darin Strauss
To a lot of us, literature’s eternal significance had seemed beyond arguing – like, say, the illegality of government-sponsored torture. – Darin Strauss
A subplot is a distinguishing characteristic of the novel; the short story, for example, does not need subplots. – Darin Strauss
In each scene, the writer sets up a situation, which brings a conflict as well as either a small victory or a loss at the close of that particular scene. – Darin Strauss
Surprisingly, Manhattan casts a sort of undersized shadow onto Long Island. Where I grew up, everyone seemed totally disconnected from the city – ours could have been any suburb, anywhere – though when traffic was thin, it took us only half an hour to get into midtown. – Darin Strauss
You get a bad review with a novel, and it hurts. But I imagine if you get a bad review with a memoir, it hurts more because you can always say, ‘Well, they didn’t like my characters,’ but when you’re the character, it’s like, ‘Oh, yeah, they actually didn’t like me.’ – Darin Strauss
What’s Denver’s feel? I know there’re mountains, and people in western hats, but I never got a good sense of the city. – Darin Strauss
Perhaps it’s because a writer lives in Brooklyn that he’d want to get away from it. It can be very sustaining, this community of writers – sometimes it’s the feeling of many hands giving you a boost. But all that identical ambition can be choking, too. The many hands slide up to your throat. – Darin Strauss
Constant rejection. No security. Career paths being dictated by freelance reviewers. And of course, the terror of the writing desk, of the blank page. Why is it so hard for our non-writer friends to understand this – that it’s a job? – Darin Strauss
For the fiction students I teach, one of the most common mistakes is to start in the wrong place. Often the actual story doesn’t begin until about a third of the way into their narratives. They start off instead with excessive scene-setting, metaphysical speculation, introducing nonessential dramatis personae, throat-clearing, etc. – Darin Strauss
Maybe the ‘Million Little Pieces’ of the world are so popular because no one ever writes memoirs about PTA chairwomen; what memoirists do, and often get in trouble for, is bring interesting lives to light. – Darin Strauss
I got a job writing for a financial technology newsletter in Manhattan. I didn’t even understand what I was writing about. The newsletter had, like, 2,000 subscribers, and it was $700 a year for a subscription. – Darin Strauss
I have twin six-year-old boys. Have no mojo. The closest thing to a mojo I have is five minutes of peace. – Darin Strauss
In order for a narrative to work, the primary character should have a concrete desire – a need that drives her story – and the story’s writer should make this goal known to the reader pretty early in the narrative. – Darin Strauss
It’s a very performative thing, grief. As with so much in modern life, I think there’s a whole performative layer to what we do because we feel like there’s a private TV show viewing our lives. – Darin Strauss
It’s good training for a novelist to try to discern the truth about a place after only a few glimpses of it. – Darin Strauss
Too much contemporary fiction seems purposefully to address small things in small ways. And yet why not try for the all-inclusive, the gripping, for the audacious? – Darin Strauss
If you’re guilty of something, you can focus on that, but if something terrible happens, and you can’t imagine how you could have changed it, that’s very difficult for the mind. In some ways, it’s more difficult not to be at fault because it’s a subtler thing. – Darin Strauss
I think it’s a wonderful fact about Judaism – at least about the approach to Judaism I most relate to: There are no universal answers. We don’t have it all figured out. God is unknowable. – Darin Strauss
Characters stretching their legs in some calm haven generally don’t make for interesting protagonists. – Darin Strauss
If the memoirist is borrowing narrative techniques from fiction, shouldn’t the novelist borrow a few tricks from successful non-fiction? – Darin Strauss