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DALE  NEAL

 novelist, teacher, journalist, wanderer
Simply one of the most natural storytellers writing novels today.

Kevin McIlvoy, author of At the Gate of All Wonder and One Kind Favor



Play hard in the dark

8/5/2013

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Blogger extraordinaire Michele Tracy Berger has a wonderful site "The Practice of Creativity" with nice tips on leading the artist's life. I'm honored that she asked me a few questions about my novel "The Half-Life of Home" and writing in general. 

What’s your best writing tip?
      Play hard in the dark. Remember the primal exhilaration of running free through woods and fields on a moonlit night, feeling a howl coming up your throat? Good. Write like that. We are the boy who cried Wolf.
     Remember that writing fiction is not a rational activity at this stage of Late Capitalism and celebrity culture. Very few people will listen, but I can’t think of a more serious game.

Can you name the moment that you felt you were really a fiction writer and did it come before or after publication?
     Sorry. In some ways, I’m still waiting for that feeling, that moment of “I’ve arrived, I’ve made it into the published author’s club, someone’s going to give me the secret handshake now.”
    Ain’t going to happen. If you keep writing, you keep failing. As Beckett said, fail better.
    You have to remember the advice Rilke gave his young poet friend who kept pestering him about publications, which are the right magazines, what’s the right agent, etc. Quit asking those questions. Those aren’t the most important ones. Learn to interrogate your dreams rather than your ambitions.

What’s the less glamorous side of a published writer’s life that aspiring writers often don’t see?
      Glamor is a word better associated with films. Writers, I don’t think, are performers in that sense. The life of a writer is not glamorous. Don’t get me wrong. It’s extraordinary to meet and talk with readers who love good fiction, but the real payoff is on the page: repeatedly sitting down and putting one word after another into sentences, paragraphs, chapters, books until you simulate the real world. You get to meet both your best and worst selves on that page if you persist.

How has your career as a journalist supported your work as a creative writer?

Well, it’s certainly paid for the groceries and light bill along the way, and for that I’m most grateful to be among that dwindling tribe of American journalists. It’s also taught me to be continually curious, which of course helps when you’re researching facts that often seem surreal or imagining fictions that seem real. Journalists work hard to grasp and say things very quickly. Novelists have to work equally hard to say what can only be said slowly, now the passage of time shapes character.


Read more at Michele's blog http://micheleberger.wordpress.com/


1 Comment
best essay review link
1/16/2020 07:15:31 pm

There are moments in our lives that are truly scary and we want to put an end to it but do not know how. We have the right motivation, but we also have some troubles in dealing with it. We are always asking the same questions over and over again, but even though that is the case we should not give up because if we give up there will be no good results to look up to. Let us keep holding on in this dark time.

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    Dale Neal

    Novelist, journalist, aficionado of all things Appalachian. 

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Asheville NC                                        Contact
  • KINGS OF COWEETSEE
  • The Woman With The Stone Knife
  • Musings
  • About the writer
  • More Books
    • Appalachian Book of the Dead
    • The Half-Life of Home
    • Cow Across America
    • Behind the books
  • Contact