This is my second Murakami experience and it was a good one. I read Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and found it relentlessly inventive but not much else. Hard-Boiled, however, has plenty of chewy meat beneath the author’s famous razzle-dazzle style. The … Continue reading
To the Lighthouse is a novelistic exploration of individual consciousness and of relationships in the interwar period in Britain. Woolf uses a stream of consciousness technique to tell us what characters are thinking and feeling. The narrator promiscuously jumps from … Continue reading
My new novel is developing slowly. I have 7,000 words since I started writing on August 1. That’s 500 words a day, a couple of pages, respectable, but I haven’t been feeling momentum. I think they’re “good” words, in the … Continue reading
Can you infer anything about a writer’s biography from what he or she has written? As a writer of fiction, I have to say, yes you can make valid inferences at a high level of abstraction, but no, you can’t … Continue reading
Setting a novel in a historical period is much more difficult than I had anticipated because of the endless research. I was writing a scene that mentioned a pipe-cleaner when I stopped short: Wait! Did they have pipe cleaners in … Continue reading