Ask the Author: David Pratt
Answered Questions (12)
David Pratt
Yes, I am. Thanks for noticing!
David Pratt
So, I am going to give some other author a great idea for a book based on my life? Um, I don't think so.
David Pratt
This is a tough one, since most of my favorite books are set in real places. I like the wonder and sadness and antiquity of Roberto Bolano's "Antwerp," which I argue is fictional because it is clearly not intended to be the real Antwerp. Right now I am re-reading Least Heat-Moon's "Blue Highways," and I am going back and forth about the "fictional" world he creates: America in 1978, seen through the lens of its history and its "old ways," all lushly described but seen very selectively, with racial issues admitted only when the author wants to admit them.
David Pratt
A good story. And I do tend to right about environments I like. I have to ask, Can I spend two or three or four or more years in this place?
David Pratt
The door clicked shut. Then she lay there alone in the brilliant light and the silence, with no company ever but the pills and her own soul. (This is actually the ending of Fassbinder's brilliant "Veronika Voss.")
David Pratt
I want to finish "All God's Dangers: The Life of Nate Shaw" and David Wojnarowicz's "Close to the Knives." My reading group is starting "Madame Bovary" this week, and then at summer's end comes Mike McClelland's short story collection, "Gay Zoo Day," to which I am greatly looking forward. And I just snuck in Kaje Harper's terrific novella "Like the Taste of Summer."
David Pratt
Jess and Ruth in "Stone Butch Blues"
David Pratt
Finish stuff. You have to have something finished before you can have something published, at least in the fiction/poetry worlds, if you're not famous. Do whatever you have to. Just press on and press on and press on and finish. Somehow, some way. If it's not so good, fix it later. Just get done. And be very aware of those powerful excuses why not.
David Pratt
I never get it. I'm not boasting. It's true. I have experienced blocks against *good* writing. But I never sit before a blank page or screen.
David Pratt
My first YA novel.
David Pratt
How do I *not* get inspired?? Somebody, please help! I get several ideas a day. Anything can trigger me.
David Pratt
When I was in my teens and first got interested in the Broadway theater, Times Square was a wreck and so was the commercial theater industry. It was the early 1970s and no one knew what audiences wanted. Some very odd shows came and went almost literally overnight. Their titles, if they lingered in the collective memory at all, became punchlines. But real people wrote those shows -- and directed and designed and produced them. Who were those people whose shows -- sometimes their only shows -- disappeared without a trace?
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