I love outsider stories. And I also like a lot of genre fiction, too. So I wanted to write a literary book that flirted with thriller and fantasy and even science fiction. I wanted the coming-of-age story and the love story to be about "outsiderdom" - one of the themes I am most interested in.
Porochista KhakpourBe careful what you wish for, I guess. I believe - this will sound bloated, but I believe it - that true art, the potent stuff, can take the world down with it, just like religion can. And the opposite of course.
Porochista KhakpourI write first drafts feverishly fast, and then I spend years editing. It's not that sentence-by-sentence perfectionist technique some writers I admire use. I need to see the thing, in some form, and then work with it over and over and over until it makes sense to me - until its concerns approach me, until its themes come to my attention. At that editing stage, the story picks itself and it's just up to me to see it, to find it. If I've done a good job, what it all means will force me to confront it in further edits.
Porochista Khakpour