Some Kind of Interesting Trouble

Posted by J. Mark Bertrand
on Sunday, May 13, 2007
|
Permalink

 

"I don't think about structure and form when I write. I don't think, 'Now I've got to avoid an epiphany, and I've got to bring in a counterpointed character.' Nothing that I've thought abstractly, as far as craft is concerned, is much help in the first drafts. I try to see the characters, hear them, and get them into some kind of interesting trouble. It's only in the revisions and the rewriting that those techniques help."

CHARLES BAXTER
in Novel Voices, edited by Jennifer Levasseur and Kevin Rabalais