Hi everyone! Just a quick bonus post I wanted to share, since it overlaps with a lot of what I’ve been writing about in the newsletter.
Last month I had the great chance to interview my former professor, the award-winning novelist Alice McDermott, about her new book of essays on the Art of Fiction, What About the Baby? which is out now from FSG Books.
You can read the full interview, if you like, here at BOMB Magazine.
Here’s just a quick taste, on “sentences”:
KJ: In the section, “Sentences,” you tell this wonderful story about realizing that you are “sentenced to sentences.” Is the sentence the basic unit in fiction, rather than words or paragraphs or pages?
AM: I always get impatient when people ask, “What’s your favorite word?” No… give me a word in context! You need the sentence to hear the music. To get a sense of rhythm, you at least need a sentence. There are lovely individual words, but any individual word can be corrupted.
That first sentence is a huge commitment. You have point of view, you have rhythm. You may even have theme or metaphor. You have something visual. The little film in the reader’s mind has some light shining through. For me, it is down to the level of sentences. That’s how we work. Hand by hand by foot.
KJ: So, talking about one word is sort of like talking about a single musical note, rather than a whole sentence which can be a melody?
AM: And voice! I mean, it’s music but it’s voice and that’s the power and the glory of it. You can look at a single sentence and see all those things operating in it.
The rest of the interview is, again, here at BOMB Magazine.