Ask the Author: Harriet Scott Chessman
Answered Questions (8)
Harriet Scott Chessman
I am hoping to continue reading Penelope Fitzgerald's fiction, because I've fallen in love with her terse, beautiful novels this year. I'm also hoping to reread To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf.
Harriet Scott Chessman
Hello Clementine, thank you for this question! I hope one day it will be published in France! I will look into this. I am grateful for your interest in my earlier novella, Lydia Cassatt Reading the Morning Paper! I do think of these two novellas as mirroring each other, and adding to each other's story.
Harriet Scott Chessman
I love art, and I enjoyed writing an earlier book about Impressionist art -- Lydia Cassatt Reading the Morning Paper. In that novella, Edgar Degas became a character. I actually tried to keep him out! because I felt unsure that I could do justice to him. But he insisted, so there he was. Over the years, I discovered more and more about his American cousins and family in New Orleans, and his visit with them over the course of one long winter. This felt like such intriguing material, so I started to try to find a way in to it. It took me years, on and off, to find my door!
Harriet Scott Chessman
I think for me this is a question of how do I quiet my daily world, my "to-do" list, all the insistent stuff I should do, and start to listen to my deeper self, the one where the emotions and voices and wishes live. If I can connect to that deeper space, I am inspired, and then it's a matter of waiting for the words to rise up to the surface. They do! if you let yourself be open and ready.
Harriet Scott Chessman
Actually, I am in that wonderful space of listening out for new stories. I have a few projects simmering, and I hope to come to them soon. One is a sequence of poems --- really, songs --- emerging out of an opera libretto I wrote for a contemporary opera about Hugh Thompson, the helicopter pilot who intervened in the My Lai massacre. I would love to come back to this material and start developing more songs. (I think of them as songs, because they're less formal than poems, and more to be sung or spoken.) I'd also like to come back to my wrestling with short stories --- I'm pretty new to this genre, and have just written a few stories, but I admire and love the form of the short story and I'd like to discover how to develop my capacity in that area.
Harriet Scott Chessman
I suggest that an aspiring fiction writer read a LOT of superb writing, listening carefully to the voice(s) created in each story, and paying attention to how the voices and story arc and scenes and dialogue have been constructed -- especially how the reader is brought in to this world, and enticed to follow and feel immersed in the story. I also urge you to permit yourself to listen with fullness and sensitivity to your own voice, in your own head and heart, as it tries to rise into the writing. Protect this space of listening and permit the words to come.
Harriet Scott Chessman
I love the chance to sit in a quiet room and create a world, filled with other people's (my characters') voices and points of view. Often this chance feels miraculous. When the writing is going well, you can feel windows and doors opening, as the story comes to you from . . . somewhere!
Harriet Scott Chessman
I should say, first, that I am a writer who almost never writes each day -- I wish I did! but actually I've always been immersed in other activities too, on a daily and weekly and monthly basis. I think of this as fertile time for my writing; I carry my writing with me inside, and I sense it growing quietly somewhere! The times when I experience what might be called "writer's block" are times when I'm actually working on a story or novel, and something's just not working. In that case, I either throw up my hands in despair and frustration, and take time off from the piece for a day or two (or a month!), or I try a new angle. Sometimes I start over! So I always think writer's block is a good thing, because it leads to discovery and a fresh start.
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