A good book is a good book, and there are a lot of different ways to approach writing or reading one.

Emily Barton

Categorized in : Book Writing Reading

A novel is a way to rethink and rewrite and re-envision the past, and also a way to speak to people who haven't been born yet about what we think about right now.

people past thinking

A lot of people have come up after Brookland and asked, "What happens to her at the end of the novel?" and I will very politely say, well, here are the two possibilities.

possibility two people

The problems that other writers encounter are so fascinating to me as a writer and as a thinker about writing. I have found that many times, my students are experiencing problems that I myself have experienced in my work, but the solution is different because they're different people.

encounters writing people

Teaching and writing, really, they support and nourish each other, and they foster good thinking. Because when you show up in the classroom, you may have on the mantle of authority, but in fact, you're just a writer helping other writers think through their problems. Your experience with the problems you've tried to solve comes into play in how you try to teach them to solve their problems.

helping-others teaching writing

Historical fiction is a collaboration between the time in which it's written and the time that it's writing about and the far future, when we don't know what people are going to think about yet.

writing people thinking

I think that novels are one of the best means that we have to communicate both with the past and with the future.

mean past thinking

Nobody thinks that there were never mechanical horses in the world. Everybody knows that there aren't really golems.

horse world thinking

I'm not for it [Brookland and The Testament of Yves Gundron ], I'm not against it, I'm just interested in it and how it functions, but I think that, in some senses, in those two novels, that was difficult for people to see.

two people thinking

One of the things that's exciting for me about this novel is that, to me, Brookland and The Testament of Yves Gundron were both, in certain regards, crypto-steampunk. They're both books that are interested in an alternate technological past that in fact didn't historically come to pass. If you were to ask me what my novels were about, I would say, well, these are novels about technology and how we relate to technology and what technology means.

[Michael] Chabon is arguing in favor of what is at the same time an old-fashioned and very forward-thinking opening up - of taking off the class associations with those labels, because we grew up, or I certainly grew up, feeling that, "Oh, there's literary fiction, and beneath that, there's these other things." He's actually saying that they're all of equal merit, and in many cases, that work in the genres, or work that draws from the genres is more entertaining for readers, since it is our job to entertain people.

opening-up jobs thinking

[Michael] Chabon, who is himself a brash and playful and ebullient genre-bender, writes about how our idea of what constitutes literary fiction is a very narrow idea that, world-historically, evolved over the last sixty or seventy years or so - that until the rise of that kind of third-person-limited, middle-aged-white-guy-experiencing-enlightenment story as in some way the epitome of literary fiction - before that all kinds of crazy things that we would now define as belonging to genre were part of the literary canon.

crazy writing ideas

There are as many different ways to write a novel as there are varieties of human consciousness, so I am totally delighted if people want to use words that come from genres to describe how this book functions because those words are accurate.

writing book people

Time is finite and the demands of the imagination and also the demands of the world are infinite, so sort of brokering some kind of agreement between those things is a continual, and for me, and ever-changing challenge.

imagination agreement challenges

I do think that the idea of writer's block can be very self-defeating for most writers because it's taking a lot of things that are not only real problems, but that are manageable, solvable problems if you look at them in an individual fashion, and lumping them under the umbrella of something mysterious and vague, which makes it very, very difficult to address what's going on.

block fashion real

Maybe one of the reasons that I don't ever experience myself as having writer's block is I don't feel that I need to be producing every minute of every day.

block reason needs

If I don't write every day for one week or even, frankly, one year, I don't really think too much about that.

writing years thinking

It would have been a hard year if I'd spent it berating myself fo... by Emily Barton

It would have been a hard year if I'd spent it berating myself for not working on the book.

berating book years

Because I think of novels as collaborative enterprises between the writer and the reader, all of my novels so far have ending with endings that maybe point in more than one direction, and that seems important to me because it seems important to me that after you've invested twenty or thirty hours of your imaginative life into this narrative that you have some stake in how it ends.

one-direction important thinking

I feel that there is an alternate ending that leaps off too far into fantasy and there is an alternate ending that leaps off too far into pessimism, but that, in fact, the novel as it has developed should, if it's functioning correctly, have equipped you as the reader to make your own decision about where you want to go with that, about where you're going to fall on that continuum. So, the novel is taking you directly up to the point that you have to choose, and it's letting you do that.

decision want fall

The development of the plot of the novel leads to a single point, and it's my opinion that the ending that the novel has, which is a somewhat ambiguous ending, is the only logical ending given the structure of the book as a whole.

plot development book