Is there a personal discipline that you apply to generate the writing? Not really. Whenever there’s something to get done I get motivated and brainstorm and figure out how I feel about the subject and get some words down. I write early notes, like a painter sketching out the first draft, on a rectangular yellow post-it pad. I prefer newer pads that are still thick. (I buy them in bulk.) When I get to the computer to actually compose the first words I usually need to have a little snack (pretzels, Cheez-Its, something) to get me going and I need to have silence. Once I get focused I usually surprise myself with how quickly the words come. But then I think about a story I once heard about Picasso. Someone asked him to draw a sketch. Picasso pulled out a pen and for 30 seconds drew on a napkin and handed to the man. The man said, “It’s amazing! How much?” Picasso said, “$50,000.” The man was shocked. “Fifty grand? The drawing took you 30 seconds?!” Picasso said, “No. That drawing took me 40 years.” And he’s right. Everything an artist has ever done or seen or thought in his life becomes part of his art. As well, the techniques, mental (and, in his case, physical), that allow you to draw a masterpiece in 30 seconds or to write a great story in 30 minutes, take many years to develop. I never have anything resembling writer’s block because I have good discipline. I’m known for always making my deadlines. That’s the Milton discipline still in me. What are the questions and problems that drive your writing? Are they questions that can be resolved in a work, or in a lifetime of work? The central question of my writing is what interesting thing can I do as a writer today. That’s it. I also enjoy expanding the complexity of the way black people are viewed by both black and white people. But the first challenge is to tell interesting stories in interesting ways. Thus, my novel Soul City introduces you to a world in which people fly at birth, a small group of women can live for hundreds of years
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because they can smell Death coming and avoid him, and one certain individual can travel to Heaven and talk to God and travel to Hell and talk to the Devil. (But he doesn’t go to Hell very often because the Devil always tries to trick him into staying.) Death himself is a character, albeit a small one and a confused one. He doesn’t truly understand why everyone is scared of him. He doesn’t like pain (she’s a real bitch). Death helps lots of people get to Heaven. What’s wrong with that? He considers hiring a PR agent, but he realizes that no one could possibly improve his image. The book comes out in September. I’m very excited. When you’re happy with a piece of work, what is it that makes you happy with it? You know that you’re finished when you look at the piece and you know every word is there for a reason and nothing could be added or subtracted. On another day it might be different, but if all those
words fit together and every word accomplishes something different and there are no clichés, then you’re finished. What role do you see the writer and intellectual playing in the greater society right now? Well, that could be a book. I was beginning to think that serious fiction was on life-support because so few people are reading serious fiction nowadays. But then Jon Franzen had his big splash with The Corrections reminding me that serious writers can have an impact on millions of people. Novelists and serious fiction writers play an important role in society by providing the great stories that entertain us, teach us, help us see society through another’s eyes. Every civilization needs storytellers to feed the imagination of the people. All I want is to be a proud part of that ancient tradition. Cathleen Everett