Found Material
When I was young, I never would have taken, say, found material and shaped it and changed it into a story of my own, which I do now. It was much harder then, partly because I was new to it. I didn’t have years of practice.
Also, when you’re young, the main thing is that you want to be a writer, you want to write something. It’s not that the thing itself is calling out to be written. So then you have to think, What can I write about? and then you look around you. That’s probably why I wrote family stories or a story about my music teacher. Now it’s the other way around, and has been for a long time—the material will speak to me, and I will respond to it.
Lydia Davis
Art of Fiction No. 227; Interviewed by Andrea Aguilar and Johanne Fronth-Nygren; The Paris Review; Issue 212, Spring 2015
A writer and translator, Davis is the author of short story collections such as Our Strangers and Varieties of Disturbance.