Bookslut Interview with Jeanne Thornton
From Bookslut:
The initial stage. Most of this book was read aloud to comrades from the Fiction Circus — Miracle Jones, Kevin Carter, Bill Cheng, Anton Solomonik — while I was in the process of writing it. One of my favorite paragraphs in the book, when Julie talks about wildflowers, was written really fast at a café around the corner when I was late to one of our biweekly “writing meetings,” just so I’d have an end to the chapter to read at the meeting like fifteen minutes later. It’s one of the paragraphs that survived pretty much unchanged from the first draft.
Writing is generally a private act, but writing fiction for me is a public one, an effort to take something hard to describe and to structure that thing as a lie that gives people pleasure. The story doesn’t feel totally real until someone’s heard it, and as a bonus I get some sense of what makes sense in the story and what doesn’t. This whole reveal it as soon as you’ve done it practice comes out of doing webcomics, also: having people read along with the story while it’s in the process of being composed just seems normal to me. It’s nice when people are in some ways as invested in the world you’re creating as you are.
