GreatWriting.co.uk has published part two of a recent interview with me (part one was published last month). The Great Writing folks were fun to talk to and they’ve done a great job with the interview write-up.
I can’t speak for anyone else, but for me novel writing is very incremental, like building a pyramid one brick at a time. Every morning I get up and I spend half an hour writing 250 words on the novel and a year later I have a book. Whereas short stories, by and large I tend to write them in bursts and oftentimes at writing retreats where I’ll go away for a while and really nail up a short story.
They’re also really different kinds of creative processes. Novel writing I think gets me closer to the bone because my subconscious churns for 24 hours on what’s going to go on the next page. Whereas with short stories I think you run out of subconscious and you start to move into deliberate craft. If you try and barf one out onto a page in the course of one or two days or a week it really is more about a premeditated ‘here is what the narrative art looks like, here are ten things that could go next, and here’s the best one and I’ll write that now’.
With novel writing I tend to know generally speaking where I want a theme to go, I know where I want a section of a book to go and I know overall where I want the book to go, but in terms of it’s emotional effect, not the actual action on the page. There are some tricks of the trade for making that happen, especially if you’re going to work impressionistically and one little bit at a time. The three things that great writing teachers have taught me:
