I think of novels as houses. You live in them over the course of a long period, both as a reader and as a writer.
What interests me in writing a novel is taking really remote voices, characters, and stories and beginning to create some kind of web.
The larger truth, the universal truth that you can give in a novel, is far greater than what you can give through journalism.
The actual Blue Rose murders, which lie at the core of the three novels, yield various incorrect solutions which assume the status of truth.
Writing in a near frenzy is wonderful and freeing, but for me, it did not result in a nice, shiny novel. Instead, what I have is a mess.
Writing in a near-frenzy is wonderful and freeing but, for me, it does not result in a nice shiny novel. Instead what I have is a mess.
A man is like a novel: until the very last page you don't know how it will end. Otherwise it wouldn't be worth reading.
What's the challenge in writing a novel that few people will read? I'm more than happy writing what I do and have no plans to change that.
You are - all your experience just kind of accumulates, and the novel takes a richness of its own simply because it has the weight of all those years that one's put into it.
Novels, in my experience, are slow in coming, and once I've begun them I know I have years rather than months of work ahead of me.
My last novel, 'The Keep,' was very explicitly technological, about the quality of living in a state constantly surrounded by disembodied presences, and I was thinking very much about the online experience.
The experience of writing 'The Kite Runner' is one I will always think back on with fondness. There is an energy, a romance in writing the first novel that can never be duplicated again.
Rather than a teaching tool, I think a novel is more of a witnessing entity. A witnessing entity? What is that? I just want the reader to step in and experience it as a story.
My first novel, 'Housekeeping,' was accepted by the first agent who read it, and bought by the first editor who read it. In general, my experience with publication has been gentle and gratifying.
'Lucky Us' ends with a description of a photograph of the novel's fictional family. I could never get enough of my own family photo albums.
Novels by British writers are among my favorites because our family has enjoyed travel in England and because they are written with an economy of words as if they were written with a pen instead of a computer. Penelope Fitzgerald is a favorite.
With the crime novels, it's delightful to have protagonists I can revisit in book after book. It's like having a fictitious family.
I had read the novel and I had heard David Lean was going to direct it - and it came as a surprise to me because American actors, if given the chance, can do style as well as anybody and speak as well as anybody.
Doing graphic novels is cool! It's fun! You get to write something, and then see it visually page by page, panel by panel, working with the artist, you get to see it fleshed out.
I am the woman with the cool vintage glasses... I am the proud wife beside her husband... I am the writer who has written a new novel.
My maternal grandmother - she was a compulsive reader. She had only been through five grades of elementary school, but she was a member of the municipal library, and she brought home two or three books a week for me. They could be dime novels or Balz...
