Zitat des Tages von Sarah Hall:
Quite a lot is required of writers these days in terms of, if not promoting the work, then being a representative of the work. It's a difficult thing, really.
I tend to research as I write so that the narrative can take priority, which is important for a piece of fiction, I think, finding out facts as and when I need to.
I'm a home-roamer and can't do study or office scenarios.
You think back and you ask yourself why you became so interested in wolves. I think it was because when I was very small, growing up in a little hamlet near Shap, we would go to Lowther Wildlife Park for birthday parties. Now closed, it was only three miles from my parents' house.
I've always been interested in wolves, since I was a child. There was a wolf enclosure in a wildlife park very close to where I was brought up; they were the main attraction.
We all have our preferences - some people go for birds - but for me, there's just something about the wolf; the design of it is really aesthetically pleasing.
You always hope you'll surprise somebody with the work. If you write something human and appealing, the perfect reader could be anyone.
I have ideas. I hear voices. Words accumulate. It's still an overriding impulse. And I'm self-employed, which means I have to be sensible and motivated about paying the bills.
Short stories are often strong meat. Reading them, even listening to them, can be challenging, by which I do not mean hard work, simply that a certain amount of nerve and maturity is required.
It's very interesting to me that the nationalist movement in Scotland has become so positive and self-reflective rather than anti-English. The referendum in 2014 was peaceful, for all its deeply and passionately divided people.
Over the years, I've lived in a variety of places, including America, but I was born and raised in the Lake District, in Cumbria. Growing up in that rural, sodden, mountainous county has shaped my brain, perhaps even my temperament.
I was useless at science. I was never going to be an astrophysicist.
Art history became an A-level option at my school the year I started sixth form. This happened because another student and I cajoled and bullied the head of the art department into arranging it with the examination board.
The beauty of interdisciplinary conversation is that the mode of expression is essentially different for each practitioner, even if ideas are shared.
There was a lot of fiction I did not enjoy, whose landscapes seemed bland and unevocative, the characters faint-hearted within them, the very words lacking vibrancy.
I was the feral, mud-bathing, tree-climbing variety of child. Why would I want to read about pirates when I could build a raft and terrorise sheep along the riverbanks?
Having judged a few competitions, it's clear that novelists are often the laziest short story writers.
I was brought up in Cumbria where I saw all these fierce agricultural women.
Apex predators are good for an environment in terms of biodiversity and trophic cascade - we have very few. But realistically, only a few areas could sustain free-roaming wolves in Britain, mostly in Scotland.
Fear is a relative thing; its effects are relative to power.
I think you can tell any human story in a particular place.
Our lives are politically wound.
I felt impelled to write. It felt demonic, and I wanted to improve, the way some people habitually pick up a guitar and get better at playing it and making up songs.
For every prescriptive idea about the craft of fiction, there's at least one writer who makes a virtue of the contrary.
Nightmares of a capital city overwhelmed by tsunami, war or plague transfix us, but catastrophe is first felt locally, and there are many homes outside the city.
Daniel Woodrell has made a name as a master of prose with personality - a densely descriptive, gamey form of storytelling, one might say traditional storytelling - of late rather an unfashionable mode.
It's taken me 15 years to feel I might be able to write and publish short stories, and for the assiduous checks of the industry to allow some through.
Swimming in the U.K. is not really about enjoying a sultry experience. It's about cold, clear acts of purification, and constitutional durability. It's about invigoration and bravado.
In my early 20s, connecting with fiction was a difficult process. There seemed to be little rhyme or reason to what was meaningful, what convinced, and what made sense.
I don't like novels that tie everything up in a plot-y way. I always think that's not really true of life, particularly of people in power.
I write in the mornings or afternoons - I'm not a night owl and can write for only four or five hours maximum.
The short story is very good at looking at shadow psychologies and how the system breaks down underneath.
I like extreme situations: people pushed out of their comfort zones; the civil veneer stripped off.