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Lynn Coady


Canadian
January 24, 1970
Novelist
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It's doubtful that any fiction worth reading has been produced on a computer running Windows Vista.


Lynn Coady
Tags: Been Any Reading
When you're not sure your anger is justified, the thing to do is ask yourself exactly where it's coming from.
Lynn Coady
Tags: Anger You Your
What I've learned is that you get better at writing by writing, and that 'youthful energy' will only get you so far.
Lynn Coady
Tags: You Get Will
Here it is, 2011, and I feel zero shame when I tell you I would like to marry my smartphone. It is a handful of pure delight.
Lynn Coady
Tags: You Like Would
Somewhere in our cultural subconscious, we crave these figures that are big and strong and unassailable, like masculine fortresses. It's like how the 9/11 firemen were venerated.
Lynn Coady
Tags: Like Our How
I've never understood people who treat their loved ones worse and with less respect than they would a total stranger or minor acquaintance.
Lynn Coady
I think, as writers, our first responsibility is to writing an honest story. Tell the story you want to tell, without pulling your punches.
Lynn Coady
Tags: You Think I Think
Never use dogs to symbolize anything. That is ridiculous. Always ensure that any dogs are just dogs; i.e., characters in the story who happen to be dogs.
Lynn Coady
Tags: Just Who Always
Readers who claim a preference for short-form over long often tell me it's because they don't have time to commit to a book-length chunk of writing.
Lynn Coady
Tags: Time Me Who
Loneliness sucks. It's a slog. It feels wonderful and exhilarating when someone makes it go away. But love is a whole different ball game.
Lynn Coady
Tags: Love Go Different
When revising, consider whether you have written anything that will hurt or offend a member of your immediate family. If the answer is no, go back and add something.
Lynn Coady
Tags: Family You Your
Formalized rules of manners were so great because they left no room for basic human haplessness. They allowed us to circumvent our natural boorish tendency to disregard the feelings of others.
Lynn Coady
Tags: Great Because Our
There are people out there who genuinely love literature, who genuinely love to read and read widely, who will never like, or even necessarily get, my books. That was a hard one to swallow, to not feel slighted by.
Lynn Coady
Tags: People Like Who
We thought we'd name the magazine for the number of bridges within Edmonton's city limits. We thought this number was 18. Much later, we learned that the number is actually 21. But we didn't like the sound of that so much.
Lynn Coady
Tags: Like Much Thought
I even felt like I liked guys better than women - that men were relevant and women weren't. It took me a while to realize I'd been socialized to have a slighting view of my own gender.
Lynn Coady
Tags: Women Men Me
Considerations of plot do a great deal of heavy lifting when it comes to long-form narrative - readers will overlook the most ham-fisted prose if only a writer can make them long to know what happens next.
Lynn Coady
Tags: Great Know Them
I avoid writing about sex out of a certainty that no matter how grown up and matter-of-fact I might try to be, there is a snickering yet nun-terrorized 12-year-old-boy inside me who would at some point be certain to grab the reins in his hairy palms.
Lynn Coady
Tags: Me About Who
True adulthood occurs the moment we grasp that the people who raised us do not exist solely for our comfort and reassurance. From that point on, the steady stream of unconditional love and support we've expected from them all our lives has to flow both ways.
Lynn Coady
Tags: People Who Our
You can't really go into TV thinking, 'Maybe I can make a few bucks doing this thing I'm only kind of interested in to support my one true love, which is prose fiction.' I think you have to love what you're doing to do it well.
Lynn Coady
Tags: You Think Really
The one thing I've always done as an author is talk to my publicists. Because they have all the best stories - and they have all the dirt on other, more famous and important writers. They're not supposed to talk about it, but sometimes you can get awesome little tidbits from them.
Lynn Coady
Tags: Best Famous You
The novel, as a genre, was once considered a diversion every bit as frivolous as Facebook, but over the years, we've managed to convince ourselves that reading fiction is as important to our mental digestion as fresh fruits and vegetables are to the processes that take place a little further down.
Lynn Coady
Tags: Our Every Years
As a novelist, you have to pick your battles. You are tired. You have begun to experience the first ominous tinglings of carpal tunnel syndrome. You wake up in the middle of the night with both hands lying across your chest like a couple of plucked bird carcasses, dead of all sensation.
Lynn Coady
There was a time when I thought dudes had friendship all figured out. The focus on eating things in front of giant screens, pretending to punch one another, competing over who can utter the grossest and most profane personal insults imaginable - this struck me as the very apex of human social exchange.
Lynn Coady
Tags: Time Me Who