Le processus que suivait cette écrivaine britannique est particulièrement intéressant. Elle travaillait en deux temps : d’abord, elle établissait un plan très détaillé de son roman. Ensuite, elle laissait libre cours à sa créativité, à l’imagination, ce qui pouvait bien sûr complètement modifier les plans établis. L’important était de définir les thèmes à traiter par la narration.
“Well, I think it is important to make a detailed plan before you write the first sentence. […] I plan the whole thing in detail before I begin. I have a general scheme and lots of notes. Every chapter is planned. Every conversation is planned. This is, of course, a primary stage […] The second stage is that one should sit quietly and let the thing invent itself. One piece of imagination leads to another. You think about a certain situation and then some quite extraordinary aspect of it suddenly appears. The deep things that the work is about declare themselves and connect.”
“Books should have themes. I choose titles carefully and the titles in some way indicate something deep in the theme of the book. Names are important. The names sometimes don’t come at once, but the physical being and the mind of the character have to come pretty early on and you just have to wait for the gods to offer you something. You have to spend a lot of time looking out of the window and writing down scrappy notes that may or may not help. You have to wait patiently until you feel that you’re getting the thing right—who the people are, what it’s all about, how it moves.”
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