(b. 1955– )
U.S. novelist, essayist, and poet.
Barbara Kingsolver
The place where I write, upstairs in our farmhouse, has windows facing into the woods. The walls are lined with bookshelves. To avoid distraction, I write on a computer that is not connected to the internet. (I check email elsewhere in the house.) My companions in this room are the likes of Virginia Woolf and George Eliot, who peer down at me from the shelves, and a blue fish named Bruno. They are all very quiet.
Answer to the question, “Do you write every day?” in the FAQs, http://barbarakingsolver.net.
Pounding out a first draft is like hoeing a row of corn—you just keep your head down and concentrate on getting to the end. Revision is where fine art begins. It’s thrilling to take an ending and pull it backward like a shiny thread through the whole fabric of a manuscript, letting little glints shine through here and there. To plant resolution, like a seed, into chapter one. To create new scenes, investing a character with the necessary damage, the right kind of longing. To pitch out boldly and try again. To work every metaphor across the whole, back and forth, like weaving. I love that word “fabrication,” because making an elaborate fiction feels so much like making cloth.
Answer to the question, “Do you go through a lot of drafts?” in the FAQs, http://barbarakingsolver.net.
The best research gets your fingers dusty and your shoes dirty, especially because a novel is made of details. I had to translate places through my senses into the senses of my readers. I had to know what a place smelled like, what it sounded like when it rained in Mexico City. There’s no substitute for that. I’ve been steeped in evidence-based truth.
“Kahlo, Trotsky and Kingsolver,” Q&A by Cynthia Crossen, Wall Street Journal, October 30, 2009.
A career is built one paragraph at a time. I wrote six books and a blue-million articles before anything of mine hit the bestseller lists. I don’t know any shortcuts. But if you’re really a writer, that’s no problem, because you’d rather be writing than anything else.
Frequently Asked Questions, www.barbarakingsolver.net (now replaced with new FAQs)