Hattie Crisell: What are the most useful things you’ve learned as a writer - about being a better writer?
André Aciman: To listen. To listen to your editors especially. If you have good editors. Good editors will like what you do. They will love it. That’s a terrible editor. Basically, you want someone to tell you, “you could have done it this way, you could have done it that way.” My first editor, told me one thing that was very useful, that if I wanted to do something in the middle of a book, I have to have prepared the reader, far earlier, for that moment to really sort of bloom and blossom. In other words, you plant the seed early and later you reap whatever it is that you planted. Then you have a kind of Wagnerian effect, where the little melody that you started with becomes far more complex when you pick it up again. And that was very helpful for me so that many things suddenly explode on the reader, yet they have been prepared for it far earlier, unaware that they were being prepared for it.
Hattie: You foreshadowed it.
André: Yes, foreshadowed it is a very good way to say it. You always write with an eye forward and backward …. I’m never looking just forward, I’m already anticipating looking backward so everything is being planted along the way …
-Interview with André Aciman on Hattie Crisell’s podcast “In Writing”