::mslexia author method::

The Anne Michaels Method
From Interview no. 22

• Pick a major historical event that will shape your characters and their relationship to the world around them. But remember that historical events don’t just occur suddenly, but are borne out of a build-up of events.

• Don’t be in a hurry to start writing. Keep the beginning and ending of the book in mind while you undertake your extensive research – perhaps over many years. And don’t worry too much about becoming entangled in the minute details of research. If you are truly allowing research to sink in, and being patient, the extraneous detail falls away.

• Don’t allow any prose to make its way into your novel that is self-indulgent: each fact must have its necessity. Only this way is the research alive, and only this way can it belong inextricably to the book’s fabric of metaphor.

• Decide on a series of persistent motifs that will run through your novel (geology, history, poetry, music, language). These are more than mere literary devices: they can be used as metaphorical tools, which will give your characters depth.

• Although it’s a good idea to thoroughly plan your novel and to think about its questions for a long time before you write, certain elements of the plot will rise organically in this process. By the time I am writing, the fundamentals are known and necessary, but there will always be an unexpected turn in the road – which is certainly necessary and most certainly desirable!

• Allow your characters a certain amount of freedom. Sometimes you will need them to lead you because, in the end, they know what’s true.

• If you’ve come up against a brick wall then simply move a little to the left or to the right. Start from a different place.

• I think for first-time writers or writers struggling to finish something long – certainly short fiction writers moving to longer forms – it’s easy to get caught up in a need to see the book unfold in a chronological order. I say simply sweep that idea aside and start not necessarily at the beginning, but maybe at page 98 or, say, 155 and just go.

• The notion of failure is very useful because you’re always pushing and exceeding your own boundaries. I would rather read a very ambitious, deeply-conceived, flawed book than something that doesn’t strive too much.

If you’ve come up against a brick wall then simply move a little to the left or to the right. Start from a different place.