We can't write a serious novel in the 21st century without acknowledging the inescapable self-awareness we're stuck with. The idea we're surrounded by falsehoods and lies. It's hard for the thinking person to believe in narratives. And yet we want some place to invest our belief.
Michael HelmWe're getting used to reality and fantasy passing into each other. Much of the border between them has been erased.
Michael HelmI like a great degree of compression. I like to mix lateral steps with forward ones. I don't want the prose ever to feel simply functional - at least not for any stretch.
Michael HelmMany of the concepts we once thought belonged to speculation or science fiction are now part of our understood reality.
Michael HelmThere's some evidence that before events of mass trauma, even unpredictable ones, people begin to feel higher anxiety, often expressed in terms specific to the event.
Michael HelmScience is claiming ever more ground from popular stories of the kind we thought we weren't to believe in.
Michael HelmI just write what I want to read, and sometimes keeping it interesting means adding one more element that ends up adding another year to the work.
Michael HelmIt's fiction's job to express how it feels to be living now, and it's a complex feeling, full of contradiction. To me it often feels like a brutal trivialization of reality.
Michael HelmI seem always to have two or three novels going at once. It takes me a long time to finish one.
Michael HelmThe idea that language can be recombined to create new forms, new things, is of course very old in poetry.
Michael HelmThe novel's not the best form for disposing ideas, though that's one thing it can do. It likely is the best form, though, for conveying the experience of us each being alone, trapped in our skulls with only these bodies and this imperfect instrument of language to convey our state and to find meaning and connection.
Michael Helm