"I do write long, long character notes - family background, history, details of appearance - much more than will ever appear in the novel. I think this is what lifts a book from that early calculated, artificial stage"
About this Quote
Anne Tyler is quietly confessing to a kind of literary over-parenting: she invents more life for her characters than the book can ever fit, then leaves most of it offstage. The power move is in that imbalance. Those “long, long character notes” are not research so much as private evidence that the people on the page existed before the plot arrived to boss them around. Tyler’s intent is practical (a method) but also aesthetic: she’s describing how to make fiction feel less like a contraption and more like a lived-in house.
The phrase “calculated, artificial stage” names a problem most novels try to hide: early drafts often sound like they were designed rather than observed. Characters hit their marks, deliver theme, move the machinery. Tyler’s subtext is that authenticity isn’t achieved by adding more detail to the manuscript; it’s achieved by adding more knowledge to the writer. You don’t necessarily show the family history, but you write it so that a line of dialogue carries the pressure of it. A character’s choice reads as inevitable not because the author insists, but because the person’s inner weather has been mapped.
Context matters here: Tyler’s fiction is famous for domestic realism, for the way marriages, siblings, and minor disappointments accumulate into fate. Her process mirrors her subject. She’s arguing, gently but firmly, for depth as backstory the reader never sees - a kind of submerged infrastructure that “lifts” the narrative out of performance and into plausible human messiness.
The phrase “calculated, artificial stage” names a problem most novels try to hide: early drafts often sound like they were designed rather than observed. Characters hit their marks, deliver theme, move the machinery. Tyler’s subtext is that authenticity isn’t achieved by adding more detail to the manuscript; it’s achieved by adding more knowledge to the writer. You don’t necessarily show the family history, but you write it so that a line of dialogue carries the pressure of it. A character’s choice reads as inevitable not because the author insists, but because the person’s inner weather has been mapped.
Context matters here: Tyler’s fiction is famous for domestic realism, for the way marriages, siblings, and minor disappointments accumulate into fate. Her process mirrors her subject. She’s arguing, gently but firmly, for depth as backstory the reader never sees - a kind of submerged infrastructure that “lifts” the narrative out of performance and into plausible human messiness.
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
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