WRITERS ASK  ISSUE 70 EXCERPTS

There are moments in life when everything seems to pivot, and things after look entirely different…When I write, these are the moments I try to capture. What was it like before things happened? How does it all go down? Do they lean into it? Or do they put their heads down and try and wait it out? How are things different after? I’m looking for the scary times, the ones that can be paralyzing and transcendent, beautiful and terrifying.—Doug Lawson

Losing my brother made me realize that we write to understand the world we live in, we write to understand the human condition. So it isn’t just since Grace’s death that I’ve been writing about grief. Fortunately or unfortunately, this has been y terrain since 1985 when I wrote Somewhere Off the Coast of Maine.—Ann Hood, interviewed by Brian Gresko

My experience is that the characters write the book. They do things that you don’t expect them to do. In Shelley’s Heart, there’s a character who is Speaker of the House of Representatives. I had no idea, no inkling that he was going to turn out to be the major character that he turned out to be, but he took over the book. Every morning when I sat down to write my 1,500 words, he would pull some other stunt.—Charles McCarry, interviewed by Kevin Rabalais

They think the route to understanding Herzog is to read a biography of Saul Bellow. But the reverse is true. You can better understand a biography of Bellow having read Herzog.—Debra Monroe, interviewed by Victoria Barrett

If you can tell a story better from the omniscient point of view, then tell it that way. If you can tell it better from first person, tell it that way. I never say, “Well, I’m going to tell some first-person stories and some omniscient ones.” I think, “How can I tell my story? What’s the easiest way to tell it without cheating?”—Ernest J. Gaines, interviewed by Jennifer Levasseur and Kevin Rabalais

In a fully realized work of fiction, the author is everywhere and nowhere. That becomes easy to understand I think if you consider Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s novels, such as A Hundred Years of Solitude.—Frederick Reiken, interviewed by Eric Wasserman