I kind of build a novel the way marine polyps build a coral reef, it's millions and millions of little precarious bodies stacked on one another. And in my case, that's thousands of minutes I go through to get from one scene to the next and build it that way.
This world of ours has been constructed like a superbly written novel: we pursue the tale with avidity, hoping to discover the plot.
I actually think that 'Bandbox,' by far the silliest of my books, is the best constructed of them.
I do not write, I build.
Let me put it in a positive light, with that archive [of Anne Romaine], we have gained extensive knowledge about how [Alex] Haley and Malcolm X actually worked and how the book, the autobiography, was constructed.
The books I'm writing are houses that I build for myself.
All good writing is built one good line at a time. You build a novel the same way you do a pyramid. One word, one stone at a time, underneath a full moon while the fingers bleed.
For me, novels coalesce into being, rather than arrive fully formed.
The temple of art is built in words.
I love building out the worlds of my fiction with fictional books.
In the tale proper--where there is no space for development of character or for great profusion and variety of incident--mere construction is, of course, far more imperatively demanded than in the novel.
