Q&A
| Q. | Do you have a Facebook Group? |
| A. | Yes! You can sign up as a fan to receive my notes and updates. |
| Q. | When will you write a sequel to The Other Side of the Island? |
| A. | I hope / plan / need to write a sequel, but I am writing another novel at the same time. I do have lots of ideas, and your interest in Honor and her island means the world to me. I'll keep you posted! |
| Q. | When did you decide you wanted to be a writer? |
| A. | I decided when I was seven. Before that I wanted to be a painter Once I learned to read, I knew that words would be my medium. |
| Q. | Where do you get your ideas? |
| A. | Experience, memory, and imagination. |
| Q. | How do you find time to write? |
| A. | I write Monday through Friday while my kids are at school. Sometimes it's hard to keep hold of all the threads of a complicated novel and I spend half my time rereading what I've already written. When I'm in the thick of a book the work goes more quickly, but beginning is hard, particularly when I'm dealing with short days and a lot of interruptions. |
| Q. | Do you write long hand, or on a computer? |
| A. | Both! I'll often write 50 pages or so by hand and then type them in, revising as I go. |
| Q. | How much do you revise? |
| A. | I'll write five or six drafts for myself and then at least three major revisions with my editor. A normal timetable for me: six months to a year of floundering, one to two years for first draft, nine months to a year revising. |
| Q. | Do you keep a journal? |
| A. | No, I prefer to write letters to friends. |
| Q. | Who are your favorite authors? |
| A. | Favorite dead novelists: Jane Austen, Jonathan Swift, George Eliot, Leo Tolstoy, Charles Dickens, George Orwell, Mark Twain. Favorite dead short story writers: Eudora Welty, Katherine Anne Porter, Sholom Aleichem, Anton Chekhov, D.H. Lawrence, John Updike. Favorite living novelists: Ian McEwan, Kazuo Ishiguro, Monica Ali, Gish Jen, Claire Messud, A.S. Byatt, Penelope Lively, Michael Chabon. Favorite living short story writers: Alice Munro, Cynthia Ozick, Jhumpa Lahiri, T.C. Boyle, Junot Diaz, Lorrie Moore, Deborah Eisenberg. Favorite biographers: John Stubbs (biographer of John Donne), Claire Tomalin (biographer of Jane Austen), Jenny Uglow (biographer of Thomas Bewick), Lyndall Gordon (biographer of Henry James), Walter Jackson Bate (biographer of Samuel Johnson), Peter Ackroyd, (biographer of Charles Dickens). Favorite poetry: Shakespeare's sonnets, collected works of John Donne, Dante's La Vita Nuova Favorite memoirs: Leo Tolstoy's Childhood, Boyhood and Youth, Tobias Woolf's This Boy's Life, and Alexandra Fuller's Don't Lets Go to the Dogs Tonight. Favorite books about writing: The Making of a Poet, by Aileen Ward, One Writer's Beginnings, by Eudora Welty, Bird by Bird, by Anne Lamott. Favorite children's books: L.Frank Baum: The Wizard of Oz books, Laura Ingalls Wilder: Little House books, Ursula K. Leguin: the Earthsea trilogy, Beverley Cleary, the Ramona books, Antonia Forest, the End of Term books, Andrew Lang's fairy tale books, Hugh Lofting, the Doctor Doolittle books, Sydney Taylor, the All of a Kind Family books. |
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