Book Notes
Writers Tell All
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The artistic process will always be a bit of a mystery. How a writer creates a world out of words cannot be fully explained, but certainly some glimmers of insight are possible. These quotes are excerpted from Off the Page: Writers Talk About Beginnings, Endings and Everything in Between (Norton, $14.95). The book is based on interviews with 43 authors that its editor, Carole Burns, conducted for washingtonpost.com. (Book World's editor, Marie Arana, wrote an introduction for the collection.)
* Alice McDermott (whose latest novel is After This): Incident (in novels and in life) is momentary, and temporary, but the memory of an incident, the story told about it, the meaning it takes on or loses over time, is life-long and fluid, and that's what interests me and what I hope will prove interesting to readers.
* Richard Bausch (Thanksgiving Night): When you're dreaming it up the first time, you are using the side of you that looks out your eyes when you wake up from a nightmare and for an instant don't remember what species you are. That's the part of you you're dreaming it out of.
* Walter Mosley (Diablerie): The best thing politically I like about the mystery genre is that if you write a book about a Chicano farm worker in central California and his trials and tribulations, the only people who read it are people who are that or who are interested in that world. But if a person is murdered on that farm, and you have a Chicano detective coming into that world and describing that world in order to solve the crime, then you have a much broader audience willing to find out about that world because of the genre. It's one reason why I keep doing it.
* Michael Cunningham (Specimen Days): When I look back . . . I can't distinguish the parts I wrote on the good days from the parts I wrote on the bad. I've come to believe that the inspiration is always there, like an electrical current, and what varies is our access to it. And I've found that the best way to cope with that is with diligence, is with a kind of daily determination.
* Marisha Pessl (Special Topics in Calamity Physics): Certainly one of the surprising truths of having a book published is realizing that your book is as open to interpretation as an abstract painting. People bring their own beliefs and attitudes to your work, which is thrilling and surprising at the same time.
