Ask the Author: Tadzio Koelb
Answered Questions (4)
Tadzio Koelb
If I get enough bookstore or reading group invitations, they'll send me!
Tadzio Koelb
Thanks for asking.
I was drawn to Trenton for a few different reasons. The first was that women had worked in Trenton’s factories during WWII, which was essential to the plot. Then, research taught me that the city is kind of a portrait in miniature of America in the 20th century—success and optimism followed by hubris and disaster, and beneath it all runs a vein poverty and disadvantage. It gave me an opportunity to look at a lot of our assumptions about our history, and to ask if the things that fed American success aren’t also precisely what we find at the root of its problems.
And of course I thought about the slogan on the Lower Trenton Bridge, a thing that had long been a kind of obsession for me, and which fits perfectly with a question I wanted the novel to ask: to what extent are we the products of our own decisions, and to what extent are we “manufactured” by the mechanisms of history and culture?
I was drawn to Trenton for a few different reasons. The first was that women had worked in Trenton’s factories during WWII, which was essential to the plot. Then, research taught me that the city is kind of a portrait in miniature of America in the 20th century—success and optimism followed by hubris and disaster, and beneath it all runs a vein poverty and disadvantage. It gave me an opportunity to look at a lot of our assumptions about our history, and to ask if the things that fed American success aren’t also precisely what we find at the root of its problems.
And of course I thought about the slogan on the Lower Trenton Bridge, a thing that had long been a kind of obsession for me, and which fits perfectly with a question I wanted the novel to ask: to what extent are we the products of our own decisions, and to what extent are we “manufactured” by the mechanisms of history and culture?
Tadzio Koelb
Writer's block is just another name for fear of failure. Once you know that, you know that the solution is simply to get on with it, whatever "it" is – whether writing or something else. The courage to fail is essential to art, and maybe to all of life, for all I know.
Tadzio Koelb
Nothing guarantees failure like surrender. While a life spent striving may never produce the results you hope for, resignation can have only one outcome.
That doesn't mean you should never give up, but you should be aware as you contemplate them of what your options really are; if we are being pessimistic we can call them the possible failure of trying versus the certain failure of doing nothing. Optimistically, they are the potential to succeed on the one hand, and a complete bar to success on the other.
That doesn't mean you should never give up, but you should be aware as you contemplate them of what your options really are; if we are being pessimistic we can call them the possible failure of trying versus the certain failure of doing nothing. Optimistically, they are the potential to succeed on the one hand, and a complete bar to success on the other.
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