Junot Díaz
Junot Díaz, a Dominican-American professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and fiction editor for the Boston Review, is a Pulitzer Prize-winning author of multiple novels and short story collections. His other accolades include a MacArthur Fellowship, a National Book Critics Circle Award, a Norman Mailer Prize, and a PEN/Malamud Prize.
Published 06/01/17
Published 06/01/17
Howl: What is your writing and editing process like?
Díaz: I write primarily in the morning. I find it hard to write more than three, four hours a day. When it comes to re-writing, to editing, I’m something of a beast. I will spend literally months and months editing a piece. Not everybody has the patience for that but if I don’t re-work a piece for a long time it never has the depth I need.
Howl: When it comes to storytelling, how do navigate real life and memories with the imagined?
Díaz: I don’t write about reality; I write fiction and even though I borrow liberally from my own life experience I always tweak things so that in the end what was once real is transformed into fantasy. Same goes for memory -- memory is nothing more than a very dim shadow of a real event. Memory is fantastically unreliable so ultimately you might work from a point of real but once it enters into the memory distortions take hold that make it so much less real. I always prefer to work in the realm of the untrue -- that is my sweet spot.
Howl: For you, what makes a good story and when you're writing one, how do you know when it's finished?
Díaz: I have no single definition of what makes a good story per se. I know what I want to see from a story and when I write them I try to achieve that criteria. Some things though are pretty important no matter what: strong character, strong conflict. I try to have those in my fiction.
Howl: What advice do you have for budding writers?
Díaz: Read. If you go to college don’t major in creative writing, if you can help it. By majoring in something else you’ll pick up things you can use in your writing in ways you can’t inside of a creative writing major.
Howl: What quirks do you have when it comes to literature that most people may not know about you, like certain books to read for certain moods, or you can only write standing up?
Díaz: I don’t write for months on end. Recently it’s been years. That’s my big secret.
Díaz: I write primarily in the morning. I find it hard to write more than three, four hours a day. When it comes to re-writing, to editing, I’m something of a beast. I will spend literally months and months editing a piece. Not everybody has the patience for that but if I don’t re-work a piece for a long time it never has the depth I need.
Howl: When it comes to storytelling, how do navigate real life and memories with the imagined?
Díaz: I don’t write about reality; I write fiction and even though I borrow liberally from my own life experience I always tweak things so that in the end what was once real is transformed into fantasy. Same goes for memory -- memory is nothing more than a very dim shadow of a real event. Memory is fantastically unreliable so ultimately you might work from a point of real but once it enters into the memory distortions take hold that make it so much less real. I always prefer to work in the realm of the untrue -- that is my sweet spot.
Howl: For you, what makes a good story and when you're writing one, how do you know when it's finished?
Díaz: I have no single definition of what makes a good story per se. I know what I want to see from a story and when I write them I try to achieve that criteria. Some things though are pretty important no matter what: strong character, strong conflict. I try to have those in my fiction.
Howl: What advice do you have for budding writers?
Díaz: Read. If you go to college don’t major in creative writing, if you can help it. By majoring in something else you’ll pick up things you can use in your writing in ways you can’t inside of a creative writing major.
Howl: What quirks do you have when it comes to literature that most people may not know about you, like certain books to read for certain moods, or you can only write standing up?
Díaz: I don’t write for months on end. Recently it’s been years. That’s my big secret.