To really be centered and to really work well and to think about the kinds of things that I need to think about, I need to spend large amounts of time alone.
Well, I think storytellers have always found murder a fascinating device.
Taking on challenging projects is the way that one grows and extends one's range as a writer, one's technical command, so I consider the time well-spent
I love the tradition of Dickens, where even the most minor walk-on characters are twitching and particular and alive.
The novel is about five students of classics who are studying with a classics professor, and they take the ideas of the things that they're learning from him a bit too seriously, with terrible consequences.
I just finished writing an essay about William Maxwell, an American writer whose work I admire very much.
I'm not sure whay I've been drawn to this subject, except that murder is a subject that has always drawn people for as long as people have been telling stories.
But it's for every writer to decide his own pace, and the pace varies with the writer and the work
So I'm not a Southern writer in the commonly held sense of the term, like Faulkner or Eudora Welty, who took the South for their entire literary environment and subject matter.
