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We met with Carolina just after she sent her work-in-progress to its first, early readers. The main questions she had, she told us, was: is it a book? This led into a wonderful discussion when a work is ready for readers and when it needs to be kept private. We talked about early writing, the need to let it be bad–even trying for bad–and then the deep and powerful art of revision. She talked about the gap between what the book wants to be and what it is on the page, and how to develop the muscles to get through that gap. The key word in this conversation was risk.
We also delved into research, especially for fiction–ways to go about it, how to fill the well, when to start writing . . . and the imaginative leap and the mysterious mirror that fiction can be in our lives. Each of Carolina’s three books had a different journey and relationship to structure and she laid that out for us. We talked about the importance of telling undertold or silenced histories and stories and the importance of steadfastly showing up. Carolina had some inspiring tools for tracking her writing work. And of course we touched on the nuanced portrayal of sexuality in The Gods of Tango, Carolina’s enthralling third novel.
Books and authors discussed:
Carolina De Robertis/The Gods of Tango
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Edward P. Jones/ The Known World
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Elizabeth Strout/ The Burgess Boys
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Gertrude Stein/ The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas
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Carolina De Robertis/Perla
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Carolina De Robertis/The Invisible Mountain
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Jerry Seinfeld/ chain of exes
Links:
Carolina De Robertis
Carolina De Robertis is the internationally bestselling author of The Gods of Tango, Perla, and The Invisible Mountain, which was a Best Book of 2009 according to the San Francisco Chronicle, O, The Oprah Magazine, and BookList. She is the recipient of Italy’s Rhegium Julii Prize and a 2012 fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. Her work has been translated into seventeen languages. Her writings and literary translations have appeared in Zoetrope: Allstory, Granta, The Virginia Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. She is also the translator of Alejandro Zambra’s Bonsai, which was just made into a feature film, and Roberto Ampuero’s The Neruda Case.
Story Makers is a podcast that features in-depth conversations with accomplished writers, filmmakers and industry experts about story craft, technique, habit and survival–everything you need to know to stay inspired, connect to your creativity, find others’ wonderful stories and your own success.
The hosts:
Elizabeth Stark is a published, agented novelist and distributed filmmaker who teaches and mentors writers at BookWritingWorld.com.
Angie Powers is a distributed filmmaker and published short story writer with an MFA in creative writing and a certificate in screenwriting from UCLA who teaches story structure at BookWritingWorld.com.
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