Who do you most wish would read your book?
What an unexpected question! My truthful answer is—“I have no idea.”
I’ve never had the slightest idea or expectation about audience(s). I am
continually surprised to encounter readers of a sort I would not have
anticipated would be reading my work. (Of course, I get a sense of
readers at book-signings, and these vary from venue to venue.)
What do you always want to talk about in interviews but never get to?
Perhaps questions of craft and technique—structure, style—but these
elements are difficult to discuss in an interview. Analyzing a work of
fiction in a university classroom or a writing workshop is probably the
most rewarding; in my fiction workshops I can spend a full hour on a
very short story by Hemingway.
(Most writers when they are interviewed
are waiting patiently and hopefully for the interview to end,
particularly if it is on stage or TV. They/we will say virtually
anything to speed the process along, out of a fear of boring a restless
audience. As fiction writers blithely make things up, so we tend to
“make things up” in an interview—more if it is live, perhaps less if it
is written, like this one. An interview as a social occasion is
inevitably prone to a certain degree of superficiality, like social
chatter generally. Nothing much serious or profound or even sincere
tends to be uttered in conversation.)
What time of day do you write?
Early mornings, late mornings, afternoons, late evenings until or a
little after midnight—these are ideal times. I seem to be more
productive as the day unfolds, and in the later hours of the evening
feel very immersed in my work. By this time it feels like, not “my,” but
“the” work—it does not feel (merely) personal.
How do you tackle writer’s block?
Writer’s block is an expensive block of real estate in Brooklyn
Heights. It has no other existential definition. Of course, people feel
“blocked” now and then while writing—probably because they have not done
enough daydreaming, sketching, note-taking, or research beforehand. No
one begins to write by typing out a first sentence. Writing is a feat of
the imagination and must begin with active imagining. This is best
experienced, I think, while walking or better yet running, in some quiet
beautiful place, with no one around. (Interruptions and banal exchanges
are the death of the imagination.)
Which book(s) do you return to again and again?
Emily Dickinson’s Collected Poems; Henry David Thoreau, Walden and Journals. ... [mehr] https://lithub.com/someday-joyce-carol-oates-will-curl-up-with-a-cat-and-read-finnegans-wake/
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