Friday, February 5, 2010

100 things about a novel

Alexander Chee waxes poetic about the way novelists work. Here's the first few things:

  1. Sometimes music is needed.
  2. Sometimes silence.
  3. This is probably because a novel is a piece of music, like all written things, the language demanding you make a sound as you read it.
  4. Sometimes I have written them on subways, missing stops, like people do when reading.
  5. It begins for me usually with the implications of a situation. A person who is like this in a place that is like this, an integer set into the heart of an equation and new values, everywhere.

Read the rest.

2 comments:

Molly Hall said...

Love love loved this!

Martha Brockenbrough said...

Glad you liked...I heard about it through Molly O'Neill, an editor at HarperCollins who has a wonderful blog: http://10blockwalk.blogspot.com/