ROBERT BOSWELL

Elizabeth Searle writes with intelligence, passion and wit. She's one of the best young writers around.

What was your life anyway but the tiny black spot of what you've done against the infinite white of possibility?

I guess if life were fair, people who led decent lives would be rewarded, and people who led indecent lives would not be rewarded.

Characters are often revealed by the ways they misapprehend others.

Every sane person has to find every day some manner of accommodating the impossible, some way of covering up for the failures of the rational world. This might actually be a reasonable definition of sanity.

We lived on a farm outside a town of about 900 people. My father was the principal of the elementary school. It was a typical Southern town - there are a lot of churches, and it's dry.

I write a ridiculous number of drafts. The characters change and grow through the drafting, and my understanding of them deepens. Creating characters in a novel is like shooting at clay pigeons and missing, and then missing more productively as the narrative continues.

You have to avoid caricature, at the one end of the spectrum, and sentimentality, at the other; which is not to say that such characters shouldn't be funny part of the time, or that their actions shouldn't evoke genuine feeling.

Writing is such a solitary thing, so it's nice, when I'm discouraged, to see people still have such faith in fiction.

Every man has a day in his life when nobody can defeat him.

Characters are often revealed by the ways they misapprehend others.

I guess if life were fair, people who led decent lives would be rewarded, and people who led indecent lives would not be rewarded.

We lived on a farm outside a town of about 900 people. My father was the principal of the elementary school. It was a typical Southern town - there are a lot of churches, and it's dry.

I guess I'm struck all the time by how outrageously wrong life is. There are times I can't stand to read the newspapers. It makes me insane.

You have to avoid caricature, at the one end of the spectrum, and sentimentality, at the other; which is not to say that such characters shouldn't be funny part of the time, or that their actions shouldn't evoke genuine feeling.

I write a ridiculous number of drafts. The characters change and grow through the drafting, and my understanding of them deepens. Creating characters in a novel is like shooting at clay pigeons and missing, and then missing more productively as the narrative continues.

Writing is such a solitary thing, so it's nice, when I'm discouraged, to see people still have such faith in fiction.

Every man has a day in his life when nobody can defeat him.

What was your life anyway but the tiny black spot of what you've done against the infinite white of possibility?

Elizabeth Searle writes with intelligence, passion and wit. She's one of the best young writers around.

Every sane person has to find every day some manner of accommodating the impossible, some way of covering up for the failures of the rational world. This might actually be a reasonable definition of sanity.