WRITERS ASK ISSUE 71 EXCERPTS
It took me ten years to write Johnno because I kept trying to be too clever. I was being indirect, trying to write in the third person and from an elaborate narrative point of view. I made many false approaches. These, I discovered, were attempts to escape the actual material.—David Malouf, interviewed by Kevin Rabalais
All through the writing of it, I thought I was writing about people in Hong Kong at the point of time right before the handover in 1997, but in fact, the city itself was my real protagonist. Richard Russo's Empire Falls is like that, where the town becomes larger than all the characters it contains. His is a wonderful novel, and one of the best examples of a novel of place that I've ever read.—Xu Xi, interviewed by Anne de Marcken
Sometimes we bring in finished work and want to know how to make it a little better, but I've more recently been just bringing in stuff and wanting to know if it has a pulse. "Is it alive or is it dead?" It's a basic question. And the answer is sometimes surprising.—Jennifer Egan, interviewed by Jeremiah Chamberlin
When you read your work aloud, you hear things you wouldn't otherwise notice: clunky phrasing, misplaced rhythms, alliteration, internal rhymes.—Joshua Henkin
I am not so much interested in the New Orleans that has been destroyed and rebuilt and stands to be destroyed again. I am interested in how people live with that fact.—Barb Johnson, interviewed by Andrew Scott
Writing can be a means through which no experience of the writer's is ever wasted. For me, knowing that my doubt or heartache or fear is a study in doubt and heartache and fear allows me to endure each fully and even productively.—Courtney Sender