I would be researching seventeenth-century garden design or I would be doing something with Pepys, but I just kept using all of it to write about Margaret Cavendish. It took me a long time to realize that I just wanted to write a book about her. Years.
Danielle DuttonFinding the form was really a very dynamic process. I went through a lot of shifting, trying to get it right. Because the writing took place over such a long time, it's hard for me to pinpoint when specific things happened, but basically the final version only materialized in the last two or so years. It was there, but it took me a while to see it and then to refine it after I'd seen it.
Danielle DuttonThere was a stage inside it and a crank on the outside that would rotate something, like a tiny tree carved of cork, onto the stage, and then the thousands of little mirrors would multiply that one tree so that the viewer would see an infinite forest instead.
Danielle DuttonI had all these sparkles I'd collected and wanted to work in, but when I originally started writing it and it was originally this novel about all these people set in 1666, what I was so interested in was the New Science.
Danielle Dutton