Literary Birthday – 16 January – Dana Spiotta

Happy Birthday, Dana Spiotta, born 16 January 1966.

Dana Spiotta Quotes

1. We are bombarded by reductions and certainties rendered in received, inert language. Countering and undercutting those is part of a pro­cess, for me, of identifying questions or tensions I want to engage through fiction. And then, in the writing (in the language, in the particularity of characters, in the structural patterning), I’m often discovering different, deeper questions. (The Yale Review)
2. Sometimes when I begin a novel, I think more about what I want to avoid than what I want to achieve. (The Yale Review)
3. Fiction is about consequence. About playing out the consequence. And part of playing out the consequence for me—because I’m a character-driven writer—is not so much about dramatic action, but, rather, that you can’t unsee what you see. My characters then have to choose to live with the compromise or try to change themselves. (The Millions)
4. So I think of structure in terms of the micro level of the sentence, the semi-micro level of the paragraph, the somewhat macro level of the chapter, and the macro level of the novel. But they all have the same structural concerns, and they’re all things you can play with as you go forward. Patterning connects the recursions. (The Millions)
5. What I love about writing novels is that you can introduce something in the first 20 pages, and when it recurs 100 pages later, the reader will still remember it, the novel will be going sideways and forwards and back at the same time, and all the meaning is made. That creates a feeling of completeness. (The Millions)
6. I love the sentence and love the novel as a form. There are so many possibilities for creating meaning and resonance. I love paragraphs and chapter headings. I love written dialogue. I love recursive syntax. Repetition of words separated by many pages. I love space breaks, prefaces, codas, lists and set pieces. I love how you can construct a whole world, a real three dimensional shape, out of only language on the page. The limitations of prose are the constraints that make it exciting to me. (Electric Lit)
7. I always do a lot of research, and maybe some of that is procrastination. I also enjoy it — I like to learn about things and study them. I don’t just read or watch things. I try things out, like an actor. I overdo, and I would say 80% never makes it into the novel. I have an austere prose style, and I like concentrated forms, but I have a kind of maximalist impulse. It is a weird tension. (Electric Lit)

Dana Spiotta is an American author of literary fiction. She was a recipient of the Rome Prize in Literature, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the John Updike Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship. She is the author of five novels: Innocents and Others, which won the St. Francis College Literary Prize and was shortlisted for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; Stone Arabia, which was a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist in fiction; Eat the Document, which was a National Book Award Finalist for Fiction and a recipient of the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters; Lightning Field; and Wayward, a New York Times Notable Book of The Year. She is married to the writer, Jonathan Dee. Visit her website.

Source for image: Author’s Website (Credit: Marilyn Hesler, Syracuse University Sr. Photographer)

by Amanda Patterson

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