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Daniel Wallace (author)

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Daniel Wallace
BornError: Need valid birth date: year, month, day
Birmingham, Alabama, USA
Occupationwriter
NationalityAmerican
Website
http://www.danielwallace.org/

Daniel Wallace (born 1959) is an American author, best known for his 1998 novel Big Fish: A Novel of Mythic Proportions - the basis for the Tim Burton film Big Fish.

Life

DAN WALLACE LOVES TOM TARRANT

Career

Wallace is a distinguished professor and lecturer in the English Department at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. He has no real opinion on current literary criticism. Of his career as a teacher, Wallace has stated:

"Teaching undergraduates is a much different than teaching graduate or post-graduate students. My job is to foster an appreciation for the art of writing. Showing a student what’s behind the curtain, so he’ll at least be able to see and appreciate these things when he reads a book. If he chooses to write himself – and of course, very few undergraduates pursue writing beyond this level – he knows some of the very basic devices used to creating a compelling story. Rarely does a student leave our program homogenized: even if that were something we wanted to do, we just don’t have them long enough."

Writing

Wallace believes that "art is a distillation of experience." He believes that "writing requires only a pen and paper, and not paint, brushes, canvases, nor expensive film or photographic equipment, so it’s seen as something ‘anyone can do.’"

Of his early writings, Wallace claims:

"I thought I was a much better writer then than I do now. I loved the stories I was coming up with, and was really amazed I could put enough sentences together to make a paragraph. It was like magic, seeing the little black marks all come together. I sound like I’m making fun of myself but I’m not. If a writer writes I was a writer. I couldn’t see very far beyond that though. The pure pleasure of invention, of making stuff up, clouded over everything else. I couldn’t tell the difference between a good story and a good story told well. I wrote three hundred pages about a pair of billionaire twins, each weighing just over 500 pounds, who ‘rent’ the mistress of one of their friends. What did I think was going to come of that? Nothing much did. And I wrote a few other books equally as promising. As I wrote I was learning to write (having not gone to school) and I was learning what not to write as well. I also finally figured out that I was writing the kind of books I thought other people wanted to read, not the kind I wanted to write. That’s when Big Fish happened, and why it was a breakthrough for me."

As a child he loved the science fiction novel Dune, by Frank Herbert. Wallace lists his favorite writers as Franz Kafka, Vladimir Nabokov, Italo Calvino, Kurt Vonnegut, and William Faulkner. Wallace also loves the novels Mrs. Bridge and Mr Bridge by Evan S. Connell.

Bibliography

References

  1. Interview with Daniel Wallace by Dan Schneider, Cosmoetica, 5/29/08, accessed Sept. 13, 2008.
  2. Interview with Daniel Wallace by Dan Schneider, Cosmoetica, 5/29/08, accessed Sept. 13, 2008.
  3. Interview with Daniel Wallace by Dan Schneider, Cosmoetica, 5/29/08, accessed Sept. 13, 2008.
  4. Interview with Daniel Wallace by Dan Schneider, Cosmoetica, 5/29/08, accessed Sept. 13, 2008.
  5. Interview with Daniel Wallace by Dan Schneider, Cosmoetica, 5/29/08, accessed Sept. 13, 2008.
  6. Interview with Daniel Wallace by Dan Schneider, Cosmoetica, 5/29/08, accessed Sept. 13, 2008.
  7. Interview with Daniel Wallace by Dan Schneider, Cosmoetica, 5/29/08, accessed Sept. 13, 2008.
  8. Interview with Daniel Wallace by Dan Schneider, Cosmoetica, 5/29/08, accessed Sept. 13, 2008.

External links

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