"I think almost always that what gets me going with a story is the atmosphere, the visual imagery, and then I people it with characters, not the other way around"
About this Quote
Beattie is quietly rejecting the workshop-era piety that pretends character is always king. Her engine is mood first: “atmosphere” and “visual imagery” aren’t decorative, they’re the story’s governing laws, the weather system that decides how people move and what they’re allowed to feel. The phrasing matters. “Almost always” is a craftsperson’s hedge, not indecision: she’s staking out a method while refusing to turn it into dogma. Then comes the most revealing verb in the line: “I people it.” Characters aren’t discovered; they’re placed, like figures in a Hopper painting. Setting isn’t backdrop, it’s a container that shapes the drama before any dialogue begins.
The subtext is a defense of a particular kind of realism, the kind Beattie became known for in post-1960s American fiction: lives lived in the afterglow of big cultural upheavals, where meaning often arrives as texture rather than thesis. Start with atmosphere and you can capture that drift - the way a room, a season, a stretch of highway can tell you more about alienation or desire than a neatly articulated backstory. It’s also a rebuke to plotty causality. If you begin with characters’ “wants,” you risk forcing them into narrative machinery; if you begin with imagery, you let the world exert pressure first.
Contextually, this aligns Beattie with a late-20th-century minimalist sensibility: precision, surface detail, emotional restraint. She’s explaining why her work feels like eavesdropping - because the scene comes alive before the person does, and the person has to adapt to it.
The subtext is a defense of a particular kind of realism, the kind Beattie became known for in post-1960s American fiction: lives lived in the afterglow of big cultural upheavals, where meaning often arrives as texture rather than thesis. Start with atmosphere and you can capture that drift - the way a room, a season, a stretch of highway can tell you more about alienation or desire than a neatly articulated backstory. It’s also a rebuke to plotty causality. If you begin with characters’ “wants,” you risk forcing them into narrative machinery; if you begin with imagery, you let the world exert pressure first.
Contextually, this aligns Beattie with a late-20th-century minimalist sensibility: precision, surface detail, emotional restraint. She’s explaining why her work feels like eavesdropping - because the scene comes alive before the person does, and the person has to adapt to it.
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
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