Time passes, as the novelist says. The single most useful trick of fiction for our repair and refreshment: the defeat of time. A century of family saga and a ride up an escalator can take the same number of pages. Fiction sets any conversion rate, then changes it in a syllable. The narrator’s mother carries her child up the stairs and the reader follows, for days. But World War I passes in a paragraph. I needed 125 pages to get from Labor Day to Christmas vacation. In six more words, here’s spring.
Richard PowersOut of grad school, I worked as a tech writer for a while before going into computer coding for a living.
Richard PowersI think that if the novel's task is to describe where we find ourselves and how we live now, the novelist must take a good, hard look at the most central facts of contemporary life - technology and science.
Richard PowersI write the way you might arrange flowers. Not every try works, but each one launches another. Every constraint, even dullness, frees up a new design.
Richard Powers