Norman Lock, author of the recent SHADOWPLAY (Ellipsis Press) interviewed by Matt Bell over at The Collagist. Here are two bits:
Life apart from the page has become difficult – this, I know to be the result of self-consciousness, which in my case is a flinching from the assault of consciousness on a sensibility insufficiently armed against its painful disclosures. I’m sure this is true for many other sensitive people; I’m just one who has happened to make self-consciousness a subject of fiction.
and another bit:
To say that I am a writer and am interested in stories is not the tautology it might appear. At least for one who was once suspicious of stories. I came of age when language was foregrounded and stories were mere plots and to be despised. Even before language was preeminent, characterization was everything; the psychological work of fiction, this was the ideal to which a young writer with very little experience of world literature – with no experience at all of anti-naturalistic forms – aspired. My mistrust of stories may have been a misunderstanding of what fiction is; even psychological fiction tells stories – yes? I may have confused story with plot, or perhaps not. Do we not seem to prefer “fiction” and “narrative” to “story” in our description of what we do? In our minds don’t we make a distinction between literary fiction and mere stories, which are what general readers seek in the best-sellers we disdain? (Perhaps writers younger than I are today suspicious even of the literary.)
Read the rest of the interview at: http://thecollagist.com/wordpress/?p=371
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