Dear Readers, I’ve finished the second act of my new novel, Darkness as a Bride. It is a story told in three acts. First draft pages pile up as I progress through the novel – my desk is lined with stacks of paper. I took a photo of the last four hand-written chapters in Act [...]
I think the early signs of my interest in ghosts are the epilogues I’ve written to many of my novels — I love epilogues. They are a way to keep the dead alive. The first draft of the Epilogue to The World According to Garp was twice as long as any of the other chapters. [...]
I’ve been busy. I don’t always choose to be working on two things at once, but sometimes that’s how it turns out. I’m never writing more than one novel at a time, but it has happened before (and will happen again) that I’m writing a novel concurrently with either a screenplay or a teleplay. I [...]
Superior fiction asks three things of the novelist: Vigorous feeling for life as we live it. Then imaginative force, strong enough to subvert and rebuild unhindered. And then--but this is rare and so essential that we might call it the "reality principle" of fiction-- shrewd sense to keep the first two locked in stubborn love with each other –Terrence Des Pres