Tracy Abell

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So having completed my word-count for the day after surviving some moments of trembling doubt and insecurity about the way my latest project is unfolding, I sought other writers’ methodologies. This, from Arundhati Roy, explains the method behind her exquisite THE GOD OF SMALL THINGS:

“The only way I can explain how I wrote it was the way an architect designs a building. You know, it wasn’t as if I started at the beginning and ended at the end. I would start somewhere and I’d color in a bit and then I would deeply stretch back and then stretch forward. It was like designing an intricately balanced structure and when it was finished it was finished. There were no drafts. But that doesn’t mean I just sat and spouted it out. It took a long time.”

“When I write, I never re-write a sentence because for me my thought and my writing are one thing. It’s like breathing, I don’t re-breathe a breath… Arranging the bones of the story took time, but it was never painful. Everything I have – my intellect, my experience, my feelings have been used. If someone doesn’t like it, it is like saying they don’t like my gall bladder. I can’t do anything about it.”

“Only about two pages were rewritten. I don’t rewrite. It was just a lot of arranging.”

“As a very young child my mother gave me a book called Free Writing and we were encouraged to write fearlessly. The first coherent sentence I ever wrote, which is actually in this book, was written when I was five. It was about an Australian missionary who taught me. Every day she would say, ‘I can see Satan in your eyes.’ So, the first sentence I ever wrote was: ‘I hate Miss Mitten and I think her knickers are torn.'”

Wow. This isn’t how I work but since each book I write takes a different path, maybe someday I’ll have something close to this experience. I can dream, right?