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“I try to do as little as possible without looking like an idiot. Research is fun and easy. Writing is hard. So I try not to let the research become an excuse to not do the writing part.”
-- Zachary Lazar
#Fun #Writing #Trying
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“It's changed dramatically in our lifetimes. Communism is gone, so now the global war is framed in religious terms. Fundamentalist religion is rampant on all sides of this war. It casts a very dark shadow over non-fundamentalist religion.”
-- Zachary Lazar
#Religious #War #Dark
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“I love the rabbit hole. I spend a lot of time looking at images, Google mapping, etc. I also love to read court transcripts, FBI files, stuff like that. You go through vast, boring stretches, but the voices are always so fascinating and slowly a story begins to emerge. It's very much like playing detective.”
-- Zachary Lazar
#Voice #Google #Rabbits
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“In hindsight, I must have been looking for a way to write about Jewishness that somehow managed to minimize irony and self-deprecation.”
-- Zachary Lazar
#Writing #Self #Way
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“Once I got interested in organized crime, and, specifically, Jewish organized crime, I got very interested in it. I have learned that, like my narrator Hannah, I'm a crime writer in my own peculiar way. Crime with a capital "C" is the subject that I'm stuck with - even Sway is about "crime" in a certain way. The nice thing about crime is that it enables you to deal with some big questioO”
-- Zachary Lazar
#Nice #Narrators #Peculiar
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“What's invaluable about actually going to the places you want to write about are the random accidental things that happen. Random, accidental detail is the best way to make a setting convincing. You can of course invent your own random details, and sometimes I will also mash up real incidents.”
-- Zachary Lazar
#Real #Writing #Mash Up
