Author Birthday – 6 November – Sandra Newman

Happy Birthday, Sandra Newman, born on 6 November 1965.

Sandra Newman Quotes

1. I think my fiction has taken on a new life since I realised that you can use writing a book as a way of constructing the world to live in—one that is not this world.
2. The first two books weren’t autobiographical. They were just more realist. I’m much more of a fabulist or even a fantasist than I am a realist. I’m more comfortable writing a book which is about imagining how the world could be, or arguing with what the world is. These books are, oddly, more true to myself.
3. We need to reclaim utopianism. We’ve allowed it to become equated with fascism and the failures of communism. Really, it’s just the desire to create a world where we behave toward others as we would have them behave towards us.
4. A lot of the time, you have to write a book that breaks rules. Most of the time, when you’re breaking rules, it’s because you’re too lazy to do the thing you know you should do. And so you have to be really sure that that’s not what’s happening when you do break them.
5. I think all teachers feel that teaching is a really good way of learning. Another thing that I’ve learned from teaching… is definitely a truth that I wish I had known when I was a teenager: there are so many talented writers out there, and so, so few of them will finish a book that is genuinely, actually finished.
6. If you’re going to persist in the world of writing, you have to be prepared for that. No part of being a writer is kind to the ego. It’s brutally cruel.
7. I’ve been drawn to post-apocalyptic stories since I was a child. The end of the world as we know it, however depressing, also involves a certain awe. Post-apocalyptic settings are also calculated to appeal to anyone who finds contemporary life a little suffocating. They’re for everyone who dreamed as a child about running away from home.
8. Know what the chase is, and cut to it. Do not write hundreds of pages explaining… why the characters are living the way they are when the story begins, or what past events made the characters into people who would have that story. (How NOT to Write a Novel)
9. The rise of fascism in all its manifestations is particularly bad. It makes it seem inevitable that I would write angry, political fiction. I find it hard to think about anything else.
10. I’m always thinking of a more popular novel I might write for money and then I end up writing a literary novel.

Source for quotes 1-6: Guernica and 7: Shelf Media Group and 9-10: The Guardian

Sandra Newman is an American-born writer who has lived in Germany, Russia, Malaysia, and England. She writes literary fiction, science fiction, and dystopian fiction, exploring themes of gender, identity, power, memory, and oppression. She studied Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia. Her debut novel, The Only Good Thing Anyone Has Ever Done, was shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award. Her second novel, Cake, was published in 2007. In 2009, she co-wrote How NOT to Write a Novel, followed by The Heavens in 2019. Her third novel, The Country of Ice Cream Star, was nominated for the 2015 Folio Prize and the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction. Her later novels include The Men and Julia, a feminist retelling of George Orwell’s dystopian classic 1984. She has taught writing and literature at Temple University, Chapman University, and the University of Colorado.

Source for Image: Larry D. Moore, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Sandra_Newman_2019_Texas_Book_Festival.jpg

by Amanda Patterson
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