Book Board Chat

What is your writing schedule and what is the one thing you must have to get in the writing zone? Chocolate? Coffee? Quiet?

As a working professional with a family, what has been effective for me has been to schedule a block of writing time a few days in advance. This allows me in off moments (like while walking to work) to free-associate about settings and conversations and themes in the upcoming chapter. Thus, when I sit down to do the work, I hopefully have a roster of ideas I'm eager to flesh out, rather than a chiding blank page.

The process of writing - of taking the moment of inspiration and crafting it into paragraphs - is one which entails contemplation, empathy, poetry, willpower and drudgery. So, once I'm at my desk, I definitely use a variety of tricks to establish a productive mood. I often write with a good cup of coffee and a pastry, (or a cigarette and scotch). I also like writing to music. Best of all, I like writing to albums which themselves are moody, groovy, thoughtful, and cohesive works of art - like Miles Davis' Kind of Blue, Stan Getz' Jazz Samba, Van Morrison's Astral Weeks, Marvin Gaye's What's Going On, Bob Dylan's Blood on the Tracks, Joni Mitchell's Hejira, Hope Sandoval's Bavarian Fruit Bread, Coldplay's Parachutes, or Ray LaMontagne's Trouble.

If your house was on fire and you could only save one book, what would it be?

When you phrase the question that way, I suppose you mean which book as a physical object is irreplaceable for me. My grandfather gave me a volume from George Washington's library with Washington's bookplate and signature. I'd grab this one as the fire trucks approached.

But it would be a different answer were you to ask what book I'd like to be stranded with. Then, I would opt for Swann's Way, the first volume of Marcel Proust's Rembrance of Things Past. I would happily read that book over-and-over and, in my spare time, I'd try to write six subsequent volumes from scratch, in a manner that was different from Proust's six, but true to his first volume.

Just a taste of an interview with author, Amor Towles (Rules of Civility) … more at
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/entertainment/news/article.cfm?c_id=1501119&objectid=10753013