Dr. Frank's What's-it

Total Quality Tedium

Sheila O'Malley turned up this quote from Darin Strauss (author of Chang and Eng):

Here's the problem with Write what you know: What too many aspiring writers know, it turns out, is that a suburban American adolescence causes vague feelings of sadness -- especially when one's formative years include a dying grandparent or housepet. A way to avoid such tedium is to write what you don't know, to labor toward peculiarity. The risk there is that your well-researched make-believe might come off as exactly that: a fake. It's the lucky writer whose story is familiar to himself and exotic to his readers.

He's got a point.

Posted by Dr. Frank at March 10, 2005 09:40 PM | TrackBack