Alexandra Alter has an interesting piece in the Wall Street Journal about the unusual tactics that seventeen writers have for crafting their fiction. Junot Díaz, Edwidge Danticat, Kazuo Ishiguro, Hillary Mantel, Richard Powers, and Orhan Pamuk are among those who divulge their secrets. Here's part of Colum McCann's story:
When he's in the middle of a novel, Colum McCann sometimes prints out a chapter or two in large font, staples it together like a book, and takes it to Central Park. He finds a quiet bench and pretends he's reading a book by someone else.
Other times, when he's re-reading a bit of dialogue or trying to tweak a character's voice, he'll reduce the computer font to eight-point Times New Roman. "It forces me to peer at the words and examine why they're there," Mr. McCann wrote in an email message.
Changing the way the words look physically gives him more critical distance, he says.
By the way, it's Nicholson Baker who tried embodying his character physically: "For his recent novel "The Anthologist," a first-person narrative by a frustrated poet who's struggling to write the introduction to a new anthology, he grew out a beard to resemble his character, put on a floppy brown hat, set up a video camera on a tripod and videotaped himself giving poetry lectures."
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