📝 Russell Banks’ Writing Routine

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Russell Banks wrote about people most novelists ignored. A plumber in a collapsing New England town. A divorced father undone by his own rage. A Haitian refugee risking everything for the promise of America. His characters rarely won. More often, they endured—wounded, disillusioned, but still alive. Banks saw them clearly, and wanted readers to do the same.

“I believe and have always believed that before all else I want my readers to see,” he once said in a Writers Digest interview. “Literally visualize, not understand.” For Banks, fiction wasn’t just a narrative act—it was moral. A way to render the invisible visible. A way to bear witness.

He was born in Newton, Massachusetts in 1940, and raised in the small New Hampshire town of Barnstead. His father, a plumber, walked out when Banks was twelve. He helped support his mother and three siblings, and by his early twenties, he was already shaped by the traumas he would later fictionalize: alcoholism, abandonment, and economic despair. He earned a scholarship to Colgate University, but dropped out his first year and headed to Florida, where he worked retail and began writing.

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