I have to come to understand that there are always two stories present in any work of art: the primary story relayed by the work itself and the secondary story that tells how it was made. These two stories are always intimately connected. The second is a kind of origin myth of the first. And, I believe, these origin myths matter.
“What is it actually about?” Nicky asked me. We were in her study. The room of a real writer, I thought. She handed me a piece of paper with a list on it. “You have four choices,” she said. “You can only pick one.”
I am astonished and humbled by how many other novels there are in the world, but it also astonishes me how little I know about how other writers write them….. I want to counter this trend and risk revealing all….Here goes – here’s how I wrote my novel….