Little Rock writer Kevin Brockmeier is featured today on Paper Cuts, the New York Times’ book blog, with a Ben Krain photo.
Among others, he talks about how he gets underway:
I can tell you that I never begin working on a story until I have a title centered at the top of the first page. I think of the title as the target toward which I shoot the arrow of the story. Then, title in place, I broach my sentences one tiny piece at a time, termiting away at them until I’m satisfied that they present the right effect. Often I become attached to certain simple words — city, song, half, pocket, dead, ceiling, house, silence, wound, light — words that call little attention to themselves, that have nothing antique about them, but that seem to trail a thousand centuries of stories behind them, arriving in a great dust cloud of possibilities.
We always knew he could write. But he even talks better than the rest of us can write.