“My characters are who they are. For years, people have written and asked me to let Margaret go through menopause. And it’s like, ‘Hey guys! Margaret is 12 and she is going to stay 12. That’s who she is.'”
Judy Blume
more infosource: “At 80, Judy Blume Reflects On Feminism, #MeToo And Keeping Margaret 12,” NPR, February 12, 2018.
category: character, fiction, YA novel
medium: interview
“Novels take me a long time; short fiction provides a kind of immediate gratification—the relationship of sketches to battle paintings.”
Donald Barthelme
more infosource: Interview with Larry McCaffery (1980), in Not-Knowing: The Essays and Interviews (New York: Random House, 1997), 261.
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category: creative process, fiction, novel, writing
medium: Interview
“Increasingly I think of myself as some strange and solitary conductor, introduced to a group of very dynamic musicians who happen to be my characters, and I have no idea how they are going to play together, and I have certainly no idea how I am going to put manners on them. I stroll out there into the emptiness of the pit and ask them for music. Who knows what they’re going to give me?”
Colum McCann
more infosource: “This Week in Fiction: Colum McCann,” by Deborah Treisman, The Book Bench blog, New Yorker, April 9, 2012.
category: conductor, fiction, music, writing
medium: Interview
“The etymology of fiction is from fingere (participle fictum), meaning ‘to shape, fashion, form, or mold.’ Any verbal account is a fashioning and shaping of events.”
David Shields
more infosource: Reality Hunger (New York: Random House, 2010), 10.
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category: creativity, fiction, language, Latin, writing
medium: Literary criticism
“It’s only now and then, maybe once every three or four days, that I manage to write a sentence in which I hear that wonderful harmonic chime that you get when, say, you flick the edge of a wine glass with a fingernail. That’s what keeps me going.”
John Banville
more infosource: “The Art of Fiction No. 200,” interviewed by Belinda McKeon, in Issue 188 of The Paris Review, 2009.
category: creative process, fiction, satisfaction, sentence, writing
medium: interview
notes: view transcript here
fiction