What I’ve become convinced makes a writer are the days you hate it, the days you’d rather stick those pencils in your eyes. Sometimes I almost punish myself – if I’m not going be able to write, I’m not going be able to do anything else. I just sit there and wait. Ron Rash Read Quote
I live in Cullowhee, North Carolina. That’s where I teach, at Western Carolina University. That region is where my family has lived for a long time and that region is my landscape. Ron Rash Read Quote
I love learning about different dialects and I own all sorts of regional and time-period slang dictionaries. I often browse through relevant ones while writing a story. I also read a lot of diaries and oral histories. Ron Rash Read Quote
Furthermore, even if ideas were gettable – say, stacked in a secluded cave like the Dead Sea scrolls – I wouldn’t go there. An ‘idea,’ especially one adhered to from start to finish, can be disastrous for a compelling piece of fiction. Ron Rash Read Quote
I think writing a poem is like being a greyhound. Writing a novel is like being a mule. You go up one long row, then down another, and try not to look up too often to see how far you still have to go. Ron Rash Read Quote
I usually do at least a dozen drafts and progressively make more-conscious decisions. Because I’ve always believed stories are closer to poems than novels, I spend a lot of time on the story’s larger rhythms, such as sentence and paragraph length, placement of flashbacks and dialogue. Ron Rash Read Quote
