Lauren Groff (born July 23, 1978) is an American novelist and short story writer.
In terms of writing, I think what most fiction writers treasure more than anything is the feeling that they're living for the length of a book inside another person.
The darkest period of my life, so far, arrived the summer I was pregnant with my eldest son. The future was growing in me with all of its terrifying unpredictability, and I found myself anxious, unable to work and woefully at sea.
I had a series of terrible jobs, whatever would allow me to write for four hours during the day. During that time I wrote three novels - all of which were extraordinarily poor. I decided after that to go and get my MFA.
At least in my case, a very simple, regular, happy life makes for better writing.
I try not to think too much or be too impatient, and let the back of my brain do its mysterious work.
Song: Heloise and Abelard by Elizabeth Devlin. Beyond the a propros subject matter, this lady can really play the Autoharp. This song sounds like something you'd find on a gramophone record.
Amor animi arbitrio sumitu, non ponitur; we choose to love; we do not choose to cease loving.
Our human impulse is to control everything, but fiction seems to me to be about allowing an element of mystery into the text.
Writing by hand is a way of letting mystery into my writing. But I'm constantly trying to figure out how to do this job. It's a work in progress.
I feel like in American fiction we're moving out of a period of intense irony, and I'm very glad about that. I feel like irony is fine for its own sake but shouldn't be the sole reason to write a book. It has been an ironic world view: that's the best way I can describe it. I'm a fan of earnestness. I feel like there's a new wave of earnestness and I'd be happy if I'm some small part of that.
Freedom or community, community or freedom. One must decide the way one wants to live. I chose community.
Sex makes things strained. There are lovely people in Oneida, but everyone was married to everyone else. And you had fathers and mothers watching their twelve-year-old daughters being inducted into the group marriage by sixty-five-year-old men. There are creepy aspects of a lot of intentional communities when it comes to sex.
I love writing from enclosed spaces: you really learn about your characters when they have tight walls to push against.
My childhood was as conventional as you could get.
I think that writers have natural canvases, and my canvas, even in short stories, often seems to be the scope of a life.
Plays are just all sort of playful asides, and there's a great deal of reference here to Greek mythology, plays, and dramas. The idea of the chorus is really important in Greek drama and I loved the idea of including that.
I won't walk under scaffolding or under ladders. I wear things like a baseball player wears things that are supposed to have luck. I am superstitious about everything.
I see ghosts everywhere, and that is partially a function of my being incredibly near-sighted and reading way too late into the night.
It's more like I write multiple first drafts, handwritten. So with my first novel, I wrote whole drafts from different points of view. There are different versions of that novel in a drawer on loose-leaf sheets. I won't even look at the first draft while I'm writing the second, and I won't look at the second before writing the third.
When I write a new draft, I don't like to feel I'm tied to any previous version. That's why I don't use a computer to write. The text looks, on the screen, too much like a book. It's not a book - it's a bad first draft of something that could one day be a book.