Words matter. These are the best Tom Drury Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
The past has an undeniable grip on everyone, except, perhaps, amnesiacs.
Whenever I have tried to make a character bad, they end up being good in some way.
I don’t really think in terms of making something that is going to be bought everywhere, because I don’t read those things. My writing is a process in which I try my best to make good sentences and a sequence of events that is compelling and believable.
Very few things are totally devoid of any possibility of humor. If you are aware of that possibility and alive to the scene becoming that way, then it just happens naturally. That’s what I feel living is like, too. I find a lot of things that make me smile or make me laugh over the course of the day.
I grew up in Swaledale, in Iowa. Its population was 220 when I was growing up, and it’s probably 150 now. I lived in town and sometimes worked on the farms outside of town in the summers.
I tend to write about towns because that’s what I remember best. You can put a boundary on the number of characters you insert into a small town. I tend to create a lot of characters, so this is a sort of restraint on the character building I do for a novel.
My dad read, I think, the Perry Mason mysteries and Zane Grey and some humor compendiums… And then at one point, the bookmobile started coming to town. That was really cool. I mean, that was when I read my first Raymond Carver story. I think that was probably 1969 or so. I must have been 13.
If you become a creative writer with the idea that you are going to make a whole lot of money, then maybe this isn’t the best choice for you.
I go back to a very specific aspect of the Midwest – small towns surrounded by farmland. They make a good stage for what I like to write about, i.e., roads and houses, bridges and rivers and weather and woods, and people to whom strange or interesting things happen, causing problems they must overcome.
I do get very involved in making a scene work without giving too much thought about how it affects the overall, which I think is hard to know in any case.
