My focus has always been on the human mind, whether I am reading or writing. My most basic desire is to know how people come to believe what they believe and how those beliefs lead them to act in specific ways. Exploring the depths of another's mind, with all its intellectual and visceral layers of complexity, is as exciting and stimulating as...
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My focus has always been on the human mind, whether I am reading or writing. My most basic desire is to know how people come to believe what they believe and how those beliefs lead them to act in specific ways. Exploring the depths of another's mind, with all its intellectual and visceral layers of complexity, is as exciting and stimulating as exploring a foreign country.
Given my fascination with mind, I search for books which have a unique and idiosyncratic voice. It is not the writer's voice I am looking for, but the voice of the characters who live out their lives on the pages. For me, "voice" is more than just a tone or narrative style: it reflects the movement and subtle nuance of a character's mind, it maps the associative leaps between one experience and the next, it connects the character's sensory experience with a unique perception. Maybe the best way to say it is that everything in such stories is characterization, to one degree or another. Books such as Jane Hamilton's, Book of Ruth, McCourt's Angela's Ashes, and Joyce Carol Oates', Because It Is Bitter and Because It Is My Heart, all have this quality that I so admire.
In my own fiction, I try to achieve a high level of psychological realism, moving into the mental space of my characters, and settling in for the duration. Maintaining this kind or realism can be difficult at times. For example, when I was writing from the mind of my 12-year-old narrator in Torn by God, there were things I wanted to say that I couldn't say and still maintain the child's perspective. Still, I felt the innocence of the child narrator was important because it was indicative of the innocence of all the characters in the story. They are all controlled by the voice of their parents, by the voice of their religious leaders, by the voice of their God. So I let the girl see what she could see and let the deeper meaning lie beneath the surface, in the subtext where it belongs. It is there for my readers to find, if they can.
My husband and I teach a very popular advanced writing workshop in California and have been doing it for close to ten years now. We meet a lot of wonderful writers that way.
Other than that, we run every day on the mountain trails near our house and we watch a lot of foreign and independent movies, and read whenever we can find minute or two.
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