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“As a writer,” author Anne Sanow says when introducing Junot Diaz at the 2009 Drue Heniz Lecture Series, “reading a book is not the same as it is for readers who do not write. Your brain is performing two functions simultaneously. On one level, the wave is steady, horizontal and calm, taking in the story the same way any reader would. On another level, the level that has to do with the writer side of you, the wave is going crazy: constantly peeking and dropping as you are thinking to yourself: ‘Oh my God, how can I do that in my own work?’”
Anne Sanow is the author of the story collection Triple Time (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009), winner of the 2009 Drue Heinz Literature Prize and the 2010 L. L. Winship/PEN New England Award for Fiction. Her work has been published in Dossier, The Kenyon Review, Shenandoah, The Malahat Review, and elsewhere. A five-time nominee for the Pushcart Prize and the winner of the 2009 Nelson Algren Award for short fiction from the Chicago Tribune, she has received fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the MacDowell Colony, and the National Endowment for the Arts. She currently lives on Cape Cod.
Two weeks after receiving the Drue Heinz Award for Triple Time, a book about life in Saudi Arabia across several decades, Anne Sanow sat down with Three Rivers Review. Here, Sanow tells us about place, culture, and the role of the author in exploring a foreign setting.
Three Rivers Review--- So first of all, and I’m sure you get this question in a lot in interviews, tell us why you chose Saudi Arabia?
Ann Sanow--- I went over to Saudi Arabia right out of high school, from sunny California to Riyadh. All my American friends go to college and I go and live on a compound outside of the city where you’re with other westerners and—you can’t drive as a woman—and you must cover up when you go outside, you can’t drink—all of these things. My response at that age was, “I’m going to get out and explore”. And I did and I got in all kinds of trouble—because that’s easy. I learned a lot in two years about what goes on underneath—you know, what people see and what is obvious. I guess I became politicized in a way because I came from California where our biggest concern in the eighties was Ronald Reagan. And then I’m in the Middle East at the time when Lebanon was a hotbed of war. I was from this country and culture where what the rest of the world sees is something that seems so black and white, but when I was there I realized that this was not the case at all.
TRR--- So did you go with the intention of writing a book? Was it sort of a research trip for you?
AS--- I had always been a writer. I didn’t know exactly how serious I was going to be, but I just started writing down notes and anecdotes, things like that, not knowing what I was going to do with them. I just knew that I knew more and could show more than most people in the US were ever going to see. I came back to the states at the age of 19. I had to start college at that point and I thought, “I’m going to write a novel about Saudi Arabia, I’m going to do this in six months and I’ll be like a young publishing sensation”. It was dreadful, trust me.
TRR--- (Laughing) How was it dreadful?
AS--- I went to creative writing classes as an undergraduate and I think that looking back on it I would say I wrote well for an undergraduate. It was like I had a character stand-in who was trying too hard to be good and observant and careful—and that doesn’t make for interesting fiction. I think we’ve all done that, where you have this ‘you’ stand-in. The type of character that if you actually knew you would want to slap them because they’re observing too much but they’re not getting involved and don’t seem to have faults. I ended up putting this material away for a lot of years, and you have a problem almost with material that seems obvious to you, we who have this expatriate or immigrant material. It feels like a burden because you feel like you’re taking on more than somebody writing stories people growing up in the suburbs somewhere. I do feel like there’s a responsibility to deal with another culture.
TRR--- How did you develop it then into this fantastic collection of stories?
AS--- The best thing I did was put this draft away for years and then when I started writing again when I was a little older, I had been writing other stories where I learned how to develop characters and scenes and situations, so I could detach and that was what I needed to do. I needed to get away from the character who was me. The first story that I did finish was the closest to anything autobiographical and that was “The Date Farm” where a young woman goes over there and she’s really frustrated and worried. I finally got that story out and realized, “OK, that’s that story, gotta do it.” And then I thought, “What am I going to do, write that story again? No.” By that point I had done a little research too and learned that I was a research geek. I love it. And I decided to really try to go underneath things and somehow these other characters started coming out and I was very drawn by the explorer aspect, almost like the old romance of the desert and from that I got the characters for my big gay desert love story sequence in there. When that came to me I thought, “This is a little outrageous, can I do it?” And then I just decided to try to do it. Then from there the linking aspect started to happen because Thurayya the 12 year old Bedouin girl in one story was so mouthy and interesting that I decided to write about her again. These stories with Thurayya and Kimberly, the other expatriate character, and Gus were so strong for me that I decided to write about them in a few contexts.
TRR--- Is the why you chose the collection of stories as opposed to the novel?
AS--- At that point, having a couple of stories and having them linked just started to really make sense. The book was very much in my head the whole time, and I never really wanted to do a novel. At the time I was a writer getting my first stories published and I liked trying different things, first person, third person, there’s a story "Safety" in there that’s in sections with titles and then I had a story narrated by a young man—I wanted to try these things, you want to try things as a writer. I wanted to satisfy myself that way and I hoped that by doing that I was somehow writing a history, because it’s about people. That was my idea.
TRR--- Not only is the setting of this book in a foreign culture, but it also happens to be a very controversial foreign culture for the Western reader. There are all these preconceived notions about what to expect from a Middle Eastern setting. How do you go about changing that?
AS--- Well I kept a lot of what would be the obvious controversy offstage. You don’t go to a beheading in any of these stories, but somebody does talk about it. We do see some violence: the scene where the young woman glimpsed across a field and her male relatives shove her back inside the house and start hitting her. Yes you could say the women are oppressed in some way, but it’s like when you scream too loud or use too many caps, people start ignoring you. I just decided that the more the characters were nuanced, the more you saw them going about real things they would do and reacting on a very emotional level, the reader would see that on some level they’re like people anywhere. Life is normal; you don’t think about having a split identity of an immigrant or an expatriate in this case, your identity contains those things together and what you experience everyday somehow is normalized. By normalized I didn’t want to smooth off the edges of controversy, but I wanted people to come at them maybe from underneath instead of having it thrown in their face. For me, nuance is truth, that is truth, and I think a writer no matter what you’re writing about, owes the truth to the reader. All of your characters have to be true to themselves and have to be in situations that seem like you’re creating some kind of life. I think particularly when you are dealing with a controversial culture, the reader has to learn in a way that is subtle, and that will hopefully accumulate into something meaningful and I didn’t want to pander to any set of expectations in that way.
TRR--- On a sentence or paragraph level, how is this “normalization” accomplished?
AS--- First, what I try to avoid is what I call this exotic cataloguing effect, where the opening paragraph is, “The smell of cumin wafted through the air and swords clashed and camels trotted by.” It’s like a big list of every spice, every sound, all of those things at once. I feel that that’s bombarding the reader with description and it’s the cheap and easy way of bringing the reader to something “foreign”. You do have to provide that kind of thing for the reader, but if you’re following people through a situation, isn’t it more regular, more correct, to describe these things as they’re experiencing them when it’s relevant as opposed to uploading? I realize that the way I’m doing it isn’t necessarily easy, in my graduate level workshops we would talk about this. What I came up with for the final versions are more filled out than my initial drafts, which were often half the length that you see them in, and I did have to go back and flesh things out because I was working for more emotional impulses with the characters. I like to work as a reader, I don’t like things handed to me. If I wanted to read something with sign posts then I would find an atlas or a travel log, but this isn’t what I want from fiction. I want to think about things, I want situations to resonate and I do want to learn something. But it’s just like when you are in a class, you don’t sit down and write everything an instructor says, but unless you go back and think about what an instructor says it doesn’t permeate. I suppose that is a bit of a pedantic streak in me, I’m that teacher that’s never giving an easy A, so I’m that writer that’s never going to give you an easy A.
TRR--- You started more or less working on this project as an undergrad, how was that perceived in the undergraduate realm?
AS--- I did start writing about Saudi Arabia, but none of that is remotely related to this. At least in my program at the time the reactions that I would get would tend to be from people who had some expatriate experience themselves and they would say, “Oh, that sounds like something I remember,” or “That sounds right.” I could write fluidly, I could write decently, it just wasn’t really a story yet. I was writing my impressions through a fictionalized character. Some people were just bored by the subject matter because they thought it was too serious, but that didn’t bother me. I didn’t want to write cute stories with epiphanies, but I also knew that it wasn’t ready to work with.
TRR--- Some of the stories from the collection were published in several literary magazines, how did you go about sending these stories out?
AS--- The initial place that I was published in was a now defunct journal called Other Voices and they now are a book imprint of DZANC which is a really cool alternative publisher based in Chicago. I waited a while before sending out a story, which I think is good advice for anyone. Honestly, most undergraduates are not ready to send things out to say, The Kenyon Review. I mean that you will look back and say, “Oh my God, I’m so glad I didn’t do that.” I think it’s wonderful to have undergraduate journals because that is where you can have people that are at a similar stage and have things in there together, and I think that’s really great. There should be more journals connected with undergraduate writing programs. I had several things that were little stories, they were OK. I had many with expatriates walking around saying pithy, wise-ass things to each other and they weren’t that great. I didn’t send them out, thankfully. "The Date Farm" was the first story I finished where I had an instinct and I said to myself: “This is ready to go”.
TRR--- What would you say is the best way of choosing where to submit?
AS--- I’m very methodical. I think that it’s obviously very difficult to read every literary magazine, but you should look at them and what people are doing. These days because things are online there are at least always samples for you to read. When I started sending things out, you had to go to the library or the bookstore, you know, get the physical thing itself. You develop a sense of, yes let’s be honest there’s a tier system. There are more established, well known writers are published in them, they pay and some of them have different aesthetics. The Kenyon Review from say, the Mississippi Review. Some things are more experimental and would never publish a long narrative piece like mine, so I would never send to them. You get smart about what’s out there and I think once you pay a bit of attention, you sort of turn into your own secretary. I have a word file that is several years old and so I just made a chart of where something goes, when I send it, how long it takes to get a response and if I have anything noted from the editor on there. You should send to a group of magazines that are about the same level that you’ve decided on, and you see what kind of response you get back and resend as you get rejections and so on. You start with your first tier choice and work down a bit assuming that initially you’re not going to get your first story published in The Kenyon Review, I didn’t. But I was fortunate I didn’t have to wait too long to get that first story published. It was wonderful because the editor actually phoned me to ask for it, which doesn’t usually happen, everything is done by email now. But I really polished things up before I sent them out and fortunately, everything in Triple Time, with the exception of one story, was previously published and "The Grand Tour" ended up winning the Nelson Algrin Award this year, so that was great. It was the only unpublished story and the one I happened to send there.
TRR--- Are you currently sending new stories out?
AS--- These days I’m working on a novel, so I haven’t had much to send out, so I’m a little rusty, but there’s perseverance and just basic administrative smarts about doing this. There’s not a mystic set of druids trying to not put your work in print. You guys work on a magazine you know this. You know what happens. You know how much work comes in. Think about the amount you guys get submitted. I’ve read for journals before and they’ll give you a huge box of submissions and that’s just for one reader and you might pass on one or two recommendations out of a hundred. That’s really how much writing out there will electrify someone out of the slush pile. That doesn’t mean a lot of it is not good. It just means that a lot of it is competent, but it’s not turning you on in some way. I think knowing a bit about the process is great for you guys because it demystifies it somewhat and there’s nothing really mysterious about it. Its work and any reader or editor wants to find a great story, so always keep that in mind, that’s the best thing. I remember being a grad student and over the Christmas holidays I had a huge box full of submissions and there was rain and sleet and I’m reading all of this stuff and most of it’s not great and then I found something great. It just made my entire vacation. I was so excited that I had discovered this person that had sent this into the slush pile. All editors want that. I do think people should wait until you feel really confident in your work and that it’s very polished and you have people other than your closest friends or advisors look at it. There’s no hurry to do it. You’ll be happier to not be embarrassed by something you have in print later, than to rush it. Some people think, “Oh God I have to get published now.” You really don’t. There are a lot of journals, the editors revolve, there are different styles, and I think there’s a lot out there. One of the best things about doing all of that research in terms of what journal to send to is that you get to read a lot of great work. Aren’t we supposed to want to do that if were writers? Because every now and then I hear someone whining about it and I think that if you don’t want to, I don’t think you should be sending your work around if you’re not interested in what other people are writing. Sometimes that amazes me.
TRR--- What did it feel like to finish this book that you were working on for so long?
AS--- There were a couple steps to that. One is that I finished and one day I thought, “Oh, I just finished my last story and I finished editing and now it’s a book.” It feels good but it takes so long that it’s a little bit of an anticlimax, you sort of walk outside and you’re like, “Ok I just finished my book.”
TRR--- How did you go about getting it published?
AS--- For me, my road to getting published was a little bit long. I wasn’t able to get this published commercially. There were all these reasons; “Almost this,”” Almost that,” “We want you to have a novel at the same time,” which is common for short story writers. Fortunately, when I decided to enter it into book contests, getting that acceptance was wonderful; you get blown away by that. I had watched for years: Who was winning the Drue Heinz? What kind of stories were they? And to get to be in that line up was obviously a thrill. Then you start the publication process and it’s like you have a bunch of mini celebrations along the way. You find out your book’s going to be published, and that’s great. Then you go through an editing process and it’s very exciting when you get your page proofs because then its set into types that are different from the type you’ve been doing. I had a fortunate experience with the press and they were very personally attentive. I felt like I got to know the people working on the book and it was a thrill when they came up with that beautiful cover. I was so delighted. I was very particular. I didn’t want clichéd Middle Eastern images on the cover. No women in black, no swords, no camels, no guys in thobes. I really didn’t want to have that on there, so I said: “There’s sand, I don’t know what else.” And they came up with this cover, and it’s a beautiful object. I had a good time with the publication process. Afterwards, when it actually comes out, you have to put some things into perspective, because you’ll hear that with the Drue Heinz you get a wonderful launch, but other than that you’re a little bit on your own. You are a short story writer. Most short story writers are not going to be on the New York Times Best Seller list, or get reviewed by the New York Times. You just have to realize that it’s the start of something longer.
TRR--- A lot of people think that there is a big difference before you get published and after, what would you say to that?
AS--- Well first of all, the validation is helpful for you as a writer, because you do feel that you’ve worked something to completion and reached somewhat of an audience and it is satisfying. All writers need that fortitude. We need to be buttressed. We need to know that we’re not totally crazy for getting at our desks everyday and making up people who talk to us in our heads, because that’s what we do. It gives you some hope that what you’re working on next might also come to fruition. But honestly, when you sit down and write everyday you aren’t thinking: “I’m a published writer.” You’re thinking: “God, how do I make this work?” It doesn’t solve your problems as a writer, but you do feel like you’re a professional of some kind. Also, there are practical things like, before you have a book out, you are not going to be asked to introduce well known writers, or to teach in an MFA program. There are just certain professional barriers pre-book and post book, so there’s that and that’s practical. You’re still the same person and because we generally take so long with what we do, it’s part of a continuum. For me at least, I feel that maybe I had some underlying confidence that there would be this career that I would try to develop. There are points where you’re not sure it’s going to happen, but if you have some sort of determination about it, that enables you to put it on a longer career thread. In terms of what you’re thinking of and what you want to write about next, that doesn’t really change. I was working on a novel at the same time, what that hasn’t changed because I have a book out. I still have to write that one and tackle it and edit it and throw away terrible prose. I think it’s much more likely that somebody will be happy to look at the finished novel and possibly publish it, but there are still no guarantees with that. Being a literary writer has a lot of risks, you need some other paying work, and hopefully you’ll enjoy that paying work, and realize that being a writer is who you are but, for me, I like to go for a healthy balance. It’s definitely who I am, and a central way that I define myself, but I’m a writer who likes to experience the world as well. I don’t just shut myself away. That for me helps keep that balance going, that’s the healthy thing to do. I try, anyway.
TRR--- Out of curiosity, what was one of the worst moments for you while writing this book?
AS--- Actually it was when I first finished it, and—I’ll be honest because it’s the stuff we don’t like to talk about most—I finished the book, I was in my second year of the fellowship at the Fine Arts Work Center, and I was so excited. I thought, “Ok, I have this whole collection finished, I’m going to do all these query letters to agents,” and when I did, I got a huge slew of responses, saying: “Yeah, send the manuscript.” I thought: “Great, I’m on my way,” and then it just did not work out like that. So I spent the next six months getting rejections and that was very difficult. I know other writers who have been through that as well and having your first book—it’s like your baby. It’s like someone telling you your kid is really ugly and stupid too. That is not easy. I had not experienced that, because all of my stories had been published, not all of them easily, but they all were. So here I was thinking, “Wow, all of my stories have been published.” They’d all either won awards or had been nominated for Pushcarts and I thought: “Alright, this is probably going to work.” And that was frustrating because I thought I spent so long on something that I cared so deeply about and that it wasn’t going to get this other life. I know writers who never published their first books and they still kept going, or writers who had to wait. Often what happens is that writers have a short story collection, finish it, can’t get it published, spend many years writing the novel, get the novel published and then a publisher releases the short story collection. So that was vaguely out there as a possibility, I just didn’t want it to be that way. That was tough because I had to learn at that point—well, first of all, you sort of learn in a brutal way how important writing is to you. While none of that feeling is fun, I think if you learn to stick it, and you go back to work, that you’ve definitely come through some hurdle. So you’re a bit tougher, and I think for me it actually was.
Also in terms of how I was working, it was hard to feel confident about what I was working on for a while, but then eventually I got really stubborn and you work with that underdog feeling. You start to feel like Rocky and you’re like: “I’m gonna do this,” and I got very determined to keep going, because I had to tell myself, “Look, I know having this first book out is not the end all, be all of my worth as a writer.” It sounds easy to say now, but I had to tell myself that then, and knowing that I got back to work after that on a new project that I didn’t know would go anywhere, was an important point in moving forward, not just in my career, but as a writer. Knowing I could do it, knowing that it hadn’t been all easy, but I was going to do this anyway. When you find out you’re utterly compelled to be a writer is when you really find something out about your identity. That’s the honest truth about my hardest moment. It’s not the writing itself, that can sometimes have its frustrations. I generally don’t believe in writer’s block. Sometimes I sit down and I’m not sure what I’m doing or I don’t like what I’m doing, but I can always do something. I may throw it away later, but that’s fine. And it’s not fun when you spend several weeks or even months at a time writing at your desk and you have to throw it away, but it happens and if you’re willing to put yourself through that and keep going, you will get better and you will come up with something. So the writing itself is a little easier in that sense, I allow myself to be frustrated with it. Write a lot of crap, its fine. It really is.
TRR--- At your reading and even in your writing there seemed to be a sing-song sound to your sentences. Is that what you strive towards, or are you more plot or character driven?
AS--- I wish I could be more plot driven, I think I envy writers who are. I mean, don’t we have this thing in literary fiction where plot is evil? It’s not true. But we tend to not use it as the first tool in our writers kit. I think I’m getting better at it, but I’m very, very language oriented. I have no skills whatsoever as a poet, but when I read the work of other people or students, one rhythm, one phrase, will catch my ear and I will say, “Wow.” I’m sure you guys have had that experience. With a piece of work where all of a sudden, you wake up a little bit and you start paying attention. And to find that different rhythm, to find the voice, is something that is hugely important. I cannot write a full draft of anything until I’ve settled into that and that takes a lot of experimentation. That’s why I throw away so much. I carry a notebook around that I write down anything in. That’s the random notebook that has phrases, descriptions; anything and often it has rhythms. The first story in the book, “Pioneer”, the story with the young boy, I actually wrote that story from the three last lines, which, originally were just a rhythm. One day, I had my notebook out and I heard a rhythm in my head and it was just a very simple beat of dadada-da, dadada-da,dadada-da and that somehow stuck in my head. I wrote it down as a Morse code series of dashes in my notebook. A couple days later, I put a few words in there, not deliberately, and I realized it was: “there is her-blank, there is her-blank, there is her-blank.” Again, I don’t know where that’s coming from. Then the three lines finally came to me. I knew it was obviously repetition, so those three lines, the last three ended up being “there is her breath, there is her breath, there is her heart.” That’s what I had; and then, I somehow had been vaguely trying to write a story that was centered around a child. That was it. It was very vague. I knew that was an ending. I’m sensitive to how rhythm starts at the beginning of a paragraph, to the end. When I teach I like to diagram things, like having them in big arcs and swirls and things, because in my head, I have that in my story. You asked about plot, I think about arcs rather than plot and I think that an arc has to have momentum. And within that there are various notes; I’m not a musician at all, but I feel like I when I speak to composers at artist residencies, we get each other. They tell me how they compose a piece and it makes a lot of sense. I have to hear it.
To type things is also part of the process for me and to retype them. The shapes of letters and the shapes of sentences, where a comma is; I love the Em dash, I love the semicolon, and I want them to live in literature. Those things sound different to me, a semicolon sounds different than a dash, sounds different than a comma—sometimes prose needs to be technically ungrammatical. You have comma splices, sometimes phrases can fall off each other, but that’s what the rhythm should be. I reject a lot when I just know it’s not right, when it doesn’t sound right.
TRR--- You mentioned that you are working on a novel correct? How does that transition from short stories to a novel feel for you?
AS--- I’m learning how to write a novel. All people who have written novels say, “I’m trying to learn what I’m doing everyday” and you do have to keep a lot in your head. I’ve had this going for a few years, but I started writing it in different smaller sections that could be stories or story arcs, and in different voices and perspectives. That was all to experiment, because I was trying to figure out what kind of voice or voices this should be in. I’ve recently determined that I was going to be using that big third person voice. I feel like it challenges me a lot more. The voice I used in "The Grand Tour" in the collection, (which also happens to be the final story I wrote for it) it’s just where my head is in terms of third person. I also want to play with the third person because I think you can occasionally push the third person out to the reader, and you can also drop in some first person echoes here and there. But I want the third person to be the overarching thing. I finally have an overall architecture in my head, but I did notice that I do think in sections. I’m thinking arcs within sections, but then the arcs are starting to connect somewhat. Right now, I’m finding that really fascinating, but it’s because I didn’t write the beginning and then write straight through. I’ve heard about writers who could do that, and I’m deeply jealous. I feel that maybe it’s more effective. But I don’t think of things that way. I tend to come from underneath the topic, place, whatever, and things that fascinate me are big, vague things like place or migration or history. Those are big, mushy terms, so I don’t feel that you can push into them headlong. You have to come up from somewhere and a character has to emerge through a situation, but eventually you do need to do some forward momentum and come up with a narrative. So that’s where I am with that. It will still be interesting to see how all of these arcs come together, so I guess I’ve learned that I still maybe think the same way, but it’s a larger project.
TRR--- All the stories in your book seem to be very scene driven, were they written this way? Was it written sequentially?
AS--- Well, they all came about differently. In some stories, what seemed like the beginning or the genesis of the story for me is something that maybe happens later in the story. For "Rub Al Khali" though, I did actually do a particular exercise with that. I was challenged by the idea of writing in the first person from the mouth of a sixty year old native Saudi woman. I thought, “Ok, this is as far as I can get for who I am,” so I was doing a bit of that method. I decided to sit down and pre-think a structure. I actually sat down and said, “Ok, I do know that she’s going to be the mother-in-law to Kimberly who’s a former character and that Minar and Kimberly will have met in prison in a previous story”. So I knew that and I just sort of sketched out sequences where I said: “This should happen. This should happen. This should happen.” I don’t normally do that. The reason I did is because I wanted to concentrate on her voice, and telling myself what the structure was initially, relieved me of having to think about that while I was writing. I knew I could always edit it, and of course I did. In that case you’re right. If it feels sequential it’s because it started off that way. But not all the stories are like that. Some of them are different. Some of them wander more. I think that "Rub Al Khali" might wander a bit less. But it does go back and forth in time. Those sorts of her reflections into the past, those tended to get filled in a little bit more later. I knew I wanted to do them, but I wasn’t quite sure where they fit in the sequence I mean, to do flashback just technically, it needs to work. You can be obvious about it, but it needs to come at the right point, so I had to think that through a bit more. Initially I did say, “Ok, I’m going to try to follow this and see if I can do that.” And that’s how the voice worked for me.
TRR--- Were you thinking of "Rub Al Khali" as the last story?
AS--- You know, in a way I was, and that’s interesting. I think I just accept the instincts that I have and I knew that it was happening later, just chronologically. It’s after the first Gulf War, so in that case I knew I wasn’t going to write something else that happened later. One story’s set in 1946, the others are sort of 70’s through the 80’s. That was like a no brainer, I didn’t really question that, I kind of knew it was going to come at the end. I did think about ordering all the stories at some point and they’re not totally chronological. I also think, in a way, that Thurayya owns this book—more than I do maybe. I mean, she took over the title story. That for a lot of people is a difficult story, because its third person but then it shifts into this plural first person sometimes. It’s not always obvious and it’s sometimes confusing, but that started happening as I was writing. And it’s like she owns the legend. She owns the rights to the storytelling. That’s maybe this weird deep structure thing that maybe only other writers would care about, and readers actually shouldn’t know that. It’s not useful for them, and it’s not what they’re going to take away from it. I think she’s my favorite character that I’ve ever come up with, because she’s so strong that I think for the first time I really experienced that wonderful magic that happens for fiction writers where we think, “Wow, this is technically my Frankenstein, but this is a living thing.” I feel like she’s real. I don’t care if it sounds crazy but she became so real that I kind of conceded to her. I was skeptical when I would hear writers talk like that and now I know that it’s true.
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For more information about Anne Sanow, or to purchase Triple Time, visit http://www.annesanow.com/
