Well Said: the fuel of fiction

Novelist Wally Lamb (She’s Come Undone; I Know This Much is True; The Hour I First Believed) in an interview on his fiction-writing process compiled for the book Novel Ideas:

You’ve said that you are a questioning Catholic. Does that questioning fuel your writing?
 
It definitely does. I don’t think fiction writers have any obligation to answer the questions, except within the context of their own stories. But I think that, unless we’re writing something very packaged and commercialized, we are all in the process of asking questions in the hopes that asking the questions may somehow help fix the world, kick us out of our collective complacency. If I had answers instead of questions, I would probably be a political writer or an editorialist. 

Read the rest of the (lengthy) interview with Wally Lamb at Gotham Writers’ Workshop (scroll down to open the interview).

21. May 2009 by Mindy
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