Late Last Night Books

One of the reasons I keep traveling out to Tucson each March is to attend the Tucson Festival of Books, which has become one of the country’s top book festivals by attendance and by the quality of authors it attracts. This year 140,000 patrons were exposed to books and authors––fiction and non-fiction, geared to readers of all ages. I prefer sessions where I can hear fiction authors talk about their books and writing careers. Here’s a sample of authors readers might look for in their librarys and bookstores.

Rachel Kadish. Kadish is the author of The Weight of Ink, a complex historical novel that took her 12 years to write. The story takes place in London in two time periods—the year 2000 and the mid-17^th century and traces the lives of two women––a history professor nearing the end of her career and an orphan who becomes the scribe to a blind rabbi.

In my day job, I am a project manager. I can’t help but notice some parallels between getting projects done and what we go through as writers. For example, in the continuum between the “Pantsers” and the “Planners,” I have late in life embraced the Planner philosophy. Map out your direction and then write to that plan. As someone who struggles with procrastination and closure-phobia, I value Plannerism as a way to actual complete something rather than draw it out into eternity. In project management, we would call pure plannerism the “Waterfall” methodology. 

Construction or aerospace engineering projects have always benefitted from extensive planning with the final product design in mind. By all means, Boeing, keep covering every little safety detail, please!

Pascal Mercier’s Night Train to Lisbon is a fascinating literary novel and also a treasure of quotable wisdom. On the walk to work a Bern schoolteacher experiences a life-changing moment when he saves a woman from jumping off a bridge into the river. If he doesn’t become haunted by the woman herself, he becomes haunted by her language and, after a ride on the night train to Lisbon, her country. In a secondhand bookstore he buys a little-read memoir and begins an excursion into the life of a physician who grew up devoted to his father yet in conflict about the fact that his father was a judge under the dictator Salazar. The passage on anger that so struck me, being someone who has spent a lifetime feeling that his temper is his worst enemy, comes from the fictional memoir within the novel.

Last year Roz Morris interviewed me on the subject of creative writing courses, specifically, and more generally, how to learn to write. It was a long conversation, so we’ve divided the interview into four parts. This is Part One.

Roz Morris is a professional writer, editor and blogger. She is the author of the Nail Your Novel series, as well as the novels My Memories of a Future Life and Life Form Three. She is also the author of Not Quite Lost: Travels Without a Sense of Direction, (for which I interviewed Roz in this blogzine exactly one year ago, January 26^th, 2018). She teaches masterclasses for The Guardian newspaper’s writing classes, and has ghost-written bestselling books.