I Spend A Lot Of My Time

For Myself, The Only Way I Know How To Make A Book Is To Construct It Like A Collage: A Bit Of Dialogue Here, A Scrap Of Narrative, An Isolated Description Of A Common Object, An Elaborate Running Metaphor Which Threads Between The Sequences And Holds Different Narrative Lines Together.

For Me, It Is About Using Everything That Is There And Using The Gaps In The Record, Figuring Out Why The Gaps Might Be There. And Then When You Move On To The Level Of What Historians Said, Laying The Interpretations Side By Side. You Also Have To Look Back At The Documents And Make Your Own Judgments. What The Record Says And What People Say About It. A Novelist Can Fill The Gaps In A Way That A Biographer Cannot.

I Think It Took Me Half A Page Of 'wolf Hall' To Think: 'this Is The Novel I Should Have Been Writing All Along.'

If You Have A Good Story Idea, Don't Assume It Must Form A Prose Narrative. It May Work Better As A Play, A Screenplay Or A Poem. Be Flexible.

Beneath Every History, Another History.