Karen Thompson Walker: Shortly after the 2004 Indonesian earthquake, I...

How much sweeter life would be if it all happened in reverse, if, after decades of disappointments, you finally arrived at an age when you had conceded nothing, when everything was possible.

Karen Thompson Walker

disappointment age would-be

I first started writing fiction in college because I was attracted to beautiful sentences. I loved to read them. I wanted to write them.

Karen Thompson Walker

college writing beautiful

Just like all great stories, our fears focus our attention on a question that is as important in life as it is in literature: What will happen next?

Karen Thompson Walker

focus motivation inspiration

My goal was just to tell the unlikely story in a way that would feel as convincing as possible.

Karen Thompson Walker

goal stories way

I kept quiet, but the knowledge gathered like a storm. I could see the future: My father wasn't coming back. And this one fact seemed to point to other facts and others still: Love frays and humans fail, time passes, eras end.

Karen Thompson Walker

storm eras father

A good story, just like a good sentence, does more than one job at once. That's what literature is: a story that does more than tell a story, a story that manages to reflect in some way the multilayered texture of life itself.

Karen Thompson Walker

stories doe jobs

This was middle school, the age of miracles, the time when kids shot up three inches over the summer, when breasts bloomed from nothing, when voices dipped and dove. Our first flaws were emerging, but they were being corrected. Blurry vision could be fixed invisibly with the magic of the contact lens. Crooked teeth were pulled straight with braces. Spotty skin could be chemically cleared. Some girls were turning beautiful. A few boys were growing tall.

Karen Thompson Walker

girl summer beautiful

To be a good editor or a good writer, I think you really need to be a great reader first.

Karen Thompson Walker

editors needs thinking

I guess it never is what you worry over that comes to pass in the end. The real catastrophes are always different—unimagined, unprepared for, unknown.

Karen Thompson Walker

different real worry

I've become a collector of stories about unlikely returns: the sudden reappearance of the long-lost son, the father found, the lovers reunited after forty years. Once in awhile, a letter does fall behind a post office desk and lie there for years before it's finally discovered and delivered to the rightful address. The seemingly brain-dead sometimes wake up and start talking. I'm always on the lookout for proof that what is done can sometimes be undone.

Karen Thompson Walker

father lying fall

Sometimes I think I might not have written 'The Age of Miracles' if I hadn't grown up in California, if I hadn't been exposed to its very particular blend of beauty and disaster, of danger and denial.

Karen Thompson Walker

california miracle thinking

Working as an editor was like being a professional reader, and the better I became at reading the better I became at writing.

Karen Thompson Walker

editors reading writing

To some degree we all live with uncertainty. We have no control over the future. Yet we carry on, we persevere, because, I guess, it's the way we're made.

Karen Thompson Walker

persevere degrees way

Sentences or solutions occur to me in the shower, or while running on the treadmill, or riding on the subway.

Karen Thompson Walker

riding subway running

There's a pleasure in being reminded of the value of ordinary life.

Karen Thompson Walker

ordinary-life pleasure ordinary

My sentences got sharper and my stories more efficient, and I gradually learned to imagine the reader more clearly and to empathize with that imagined reader, which is a crucial part of learning to tell stories.

Karen Thompson Walker

imagine reader stories

As an editor, I read Charlotte Rogan's amazing debut novel, 'The Lifeboat,' when it was still in manuscript. I read it in one night, and I really wanted my company to publish it, but we lost it to another house. It's such a wonderful combination of beautiful writing and suspenseful storytelling.

Karen Thompson Walker

writing beautiful night

End-of-the-world stories tend to ring true. I've always been drawn to them, but as I wrote my own, I found surprising pleasure in creating a world that is so radically changed, yet where there's so much meaning and value in every small and ordinary thing we have, and take for granted: hot showers, enough food, friends, routines.

Karen Thompson Walker

creating stories hot

With a little persuasion, any familiar thing can turn abnormal in the mind. Here's a thought experiment. Consider this brutal bit of magic. A human grows a second human in a space inside her belly; she grows a second heart and a second brain, second eyes and second limbs, a complete set of second body parts as if for use as spares, and then, after almost a year, she expels that second screaming being out of her belly and into the world, alive. Bizarre, isn't it?

Karen Thompson Walker

eye heart years

I just hope that readers and publishers continue to appreciate good writing and good storytelling in all their various forms. And I hope that people continue to read books, even though we have so many other options for entertainment.

Karen Thompson Walker

writing book people

Shortly after the 2004 Indonesian earthquake, I read that the earthquake had affected the rotation of the earth, shortening the length of our 24-hour day. Even though the change was extremely slight - only a few microseconds - I found the idea incredibly haunting.