Our lives are shaped by networks: of family, friends, and colleagues, or the wider ones that encompass neighbors and fellow citizens. We exist in relation to others. And yet novels, beginning almost as soon as Don Quixote set out on his quest, have long fixated on the individual as a shaper of his or her fate, as the fundamental unit for a story. The individual acts or is acted upon, and narrative results from this tension.
~ Gal Beckerman via The Atlantic
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An editor—especially a brilliant one, as I’ve been lucky to have—pushes against your ideas, hones your writing, demands that you express yourself with the utmost clarity.
~ Gal Beckerman via The Atlantic
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Exile has always served as a powerful engine for fiction. To find yourself displaced, whether self-imposed or inflicted by a state, is to be simultaneously inside and outside; you gain intimate proximity to your new society while still standing at a distance from it, seeing things real insiders can’t.
~ Gal Beckerman via The Atlantic
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The exile will always be at least slightly alien to her adopted culture. At the same time, her knowledge of that new place and its people is immersive; she is not a tourist and she can never really return to the person she was before she left home. This duality is also the novelist’s superpower.
~ Gal Beckerman via The Atlantic
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