As I see it, whoever’s doing the inventing is also doing most of the learning – and probably having most of the fun.
You have to really understand how people speak, and you have to reconstruct it… Most pleasure in writing, you know, is in inventing.
An extraordinary amount of arrogance is present in any claim of having been the first in inventing something.
Good fiction is about asserting the beauties of the world, inventing a new, positive thing. Where am I going to get that? And it should be original; it should not be cliched. So the way I looked at history was not to accuse it of failure.
My brother died when he was 19, so a part of me indulges and thinks that some part of him that made him uniquely him is out there, on another plane. So inventing the fictional afterlife in ‘Sing, Unburied, Sing’ was a way of making that wish real.
I love inventing interesting people and then pushing them to their absolute limits – and usually those absolute limits involve homicidal faeries, werewolves, or some other paranormal menace.
At the same time, it’s a family story and more of an epic. I needed the third-person. I tried to give a sense that Cal, in writing his story, is perhaps inventing his past as much as recalling it.
The bottom line may be that my inventing buildings is, indeed, a very private kind of activity. But it’s done to be shared. It is comforting and consoling. From the reactions I get I can see I’m not doing something strange.
One reason why in Hollywood we are so often inventing heroes is that real heroes are vexing.
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