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INTERVIEWER
Do you have any writing rituals?
DIDION
The most important is that I need an hour alone before dinner, with a drink, to go over what I've done that day. I can't do it late in the afternoon because I'm too close to it. Also, the drink helps. It removes me from the pages. . . . Another thing I need to do, when I'm near the end of the book, is sleep in the same room with it. That's one reason I go home to Sacramento to finish things. Somehow the book doesn't leave you when you're asleep right next to it. In Sacramento nobody cares if I appear or not. I can just get up and start typing.
INTERVIEWER
What's the main difference between the process of fiction and the process of nonfiction?
DIDION
The element of discovery takes place, in nonfiction, not during the writing but during the research. This makes writing a piece very tedious. You already know what it's about. |
 Download a PDF of the full interview |
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| Authors Mentioned |
| Jane Bowles, Gabriel GarcÌa M·rquez, Ernest Hemingway, James Jones, Katherine Anne Porter, Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë, Colette, Joseph Conrad, George Eliot, Henry James, Carson McCullers, Anaïs Nin, Flannery O’Connor, Virginia Woolf |
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