Literary Birthday – 19 July – Kelly Link

Happy Birthday, Kelly Link, born on 19 July 1969.

Kelly Link Quotes

1. I usually say that I’m a science-fiction writer. Although if I say that to a group of science-fiction writers, they usually start laughing – I don’t actually write traditional science fiction. (Kill Your Darlings)
2. My goal, often, is to keep on knocking over the reader. To establish enough of the narrative so that they trust that I know what I’m doing, but to continue to unfold things so that whenever they think they have their feet, they find that something is a little bit different from what they thought it was. To keep them interested. (Kill Your Darlings)
3. All genres have sets of rules or guidelines. If you push them too far out of shape, then even your ideal reader is going to begin to feel dissatisfied, but if you use enough of them, then you can go on to do other things. (Kill Your Darlings)
4. I don’t have any sort of formal outline, but I tend to have a particular kind of structure in my head, and I usually have a firm idea of the ending that I’m working toward. (Conjunctions)
5. The thing that distinguishes a young-adult narrative is a story of coming into a new world or a new sphere, experiencing things for the first time. So there’s actually a lot of overlap between science fiction and fantasy and young adult, because frequently genre narratives, even mystery, are about people being thrust into a new world or taking on new responsibilities. (LA Times)
6. Faerie tales and mythologies are so bare bones that they are infinitely variable. You can rework them over and over again, and they are strong enough narratives that they can support that kind of work. (LA Times)
7. I think every writer—whether or not they are writing in genres like fantasy or science fiction—benefits from thinking about how strangeness or moments of trauma rearrange, disrupt, and reverse how we make sense of the world and our place or path in it. (Bomb)
8. Before I begin a story, I usually have a clear sense of what will happen in it and what the tone will be. I then think a great deal about the different spheres of genre the story might exist in and which parts of those genres I wish to embrace and which I’m going to push against or complicate. (Bomb)
9. Dreams are vivid, fragmentary, and have a kind of uncanny weight that is entirely personal. So how does a writer translate that deeply personal and inexplicable sensation into narrative? It seems easier in poetry than in short stories or novels. (Bomb)
10. Stories usually arrive as fragments that attach to questions. (LARB)
11. The part of writing that is most pleasurable to me is problem-solving. Story math. How do I achieve a certain kind of mood? What can I leave out? What are the different ways to read the fantastic bits of the story? (LARB)
12. I want to come up with an interesting kind of narrative problem to solve, whether it has to do with point of view, or structure, or a certain kind of twist that I don’t want the reader to guess. Secondly, I want to do this in a way that will be entertaining for the reader. Finally, I want to make the story to be as good as I can make it, sentence by sentence. (Valley Advocate)

Kelly Link is an award-winning American novelist, short-story writer, editor, and publisher. She is celebrated for her imaginative fiction, which blends fantasy, science fiction, horror, magical realism, and literary fiction into stories that are often described as slipstream. Link is the author of the acclaimed collections Stranger Things Happen, Magic for Beginners, Pretty Monsters, Get in Trouble, and White Cat, Black Dog. In 2024, she published her first novel, The Book of Love. Her work has earned numerous honours, including a Hugo Award, three Nebula Awards, and three World Fantasy Awards. A 2018 MacArthur Fellow, Link has also received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. She owns the independent bookstore Book Moon in Easthampton, Massachusetts, and teaches at Smith College as the Elizabeth Drew Professor of English Language and Literature.

Source for photograph: Author’s Website

by Amanda Patterson
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