And I should say thank you, Kate,
for the beautiful introduction.
My heart was thumping, you know?
Because I hadn't struck that Wonder Woman pose.
So if anybody has any questions.
Yeah, if anyone has any questions,
I'll just come to you and you can just raise your hand.
Maybe I stopped too soon.
Can you say something about the pacing, I guess?
I'm not sure I can explain what I mean,
but the intensity picks up in a really nice way,
it seems to me.
The beginning is-- feels a little desultory,
and then things get wound tighter and tighter.
I wonder if that's why--
Well, I think it's like a piece that does--
it goes back in time, and then comes--
it keeps spiraling back and forth as it--
I don't know.
It's all very much by the seat of my pants.
It just has to feel right, you know?
I look on that same theme, I mean you are--
you write short stories and novels,
and I'm just wondering just in terms of pacing and the kind
of--
how you go about the writing process itself.
Does it differ between novels and short stories?
Well, this started out as a very long short story, and actually
the editor of Cutthroat here, and she kindly took
this very long story and published it, and then later
on I showed the story to Bloomsbury,
Nancy Miller at Bloomsbury.
And she said, "Well, I love this story,
but I think it really needs to be a novel."
And it was the case when I was writing it
that I had kept taking things out of it,
because I wanted it to be a short story.
But I thought, well, there probably was a reason
that I kept making it bigger.
And I guess in making it into a novel it was like I really
wanted to explore more of the consequences of the choices
that the characters made.
The two women in this story, the two young women,
end up having very different lives.
And they both get to have something and not
have something.
And Edith Wharton has a nice little short piece
about what makes a difference between a novel
and a short story.
And I think she just says, it's like exploring the character
over time.
And that's what I really had the opportunity
to do when I changed it from a--
I think it ended up being like a 40 page short story when it
was published into the novel.
And I got--
I had the chance also to--
in the original story there had been more of a focus
on the female friendship, and because I really
was interested in exploring more the consequences
of these choices over time then I
discovered how much the story was about--
it really is Charlotte's story.
It ends up being primarily her story
and it becomes more a story too about her marriage,
and about how some of the choices
she made distorted her life.
And so there's a reckoning to be made.
But in terms of just working, I think
that I work in a very similar way,
and I'm just always revising and trying to figure out
what else do I need to know?
What other feature of this character's life
do I have to explore further, and I always--
I like that phrase that Virginia Woolf used, like tunneling.
That just trying to get closer and closer
to the truth of the character.
And that's it for me.
And then I read the stuff aloud all the time,
because I'm really interested in how
it sounds, and it has to sound right,
and it has to sound right--
each word has to sound right, and then
each sentence and paragraph.
And going back to Kenny's question earlier,
I mean it's like the pacing has to sound right.
So one section is doing this, and then there's
maybe picking up the pacing.
And so with a novel, it is a bit more--
I think it's a bit more like you're dealing with a symphony
or something, where you have different parts that
have to have more parts, and you have
to probably have more changes in pacing
than you do in the short story.
I don't think one is easier than the other.
You have more stuff you have to control with a novel.
It's kind of like sometimes, it gets heavy.
So well, because I've read both the short story and the novel,
it's interesting because when the short story first
came in with the pacing at the beginning of it was too slow.
We said this is like a novel, and that was really
where we did most of the editing was in the beginning to get
into the story more quickly.
But then the thing that was interesting to me
when I read the novel was, in the short story the reveal
that she slept with her girlfriend's boyfriend
comes kind of late in the story, whereas in the novel
it comes in much earlier.
Very early.
Yeah.
So I was wondering if you might want to comment
on that specifically.
Yes.
Yeah, good question, because that is something that--
I mean, you're going to be spending this whole novel
with this person.
She's telling you her side of this story
and really trying to understand some things about her life.
And so right away, she--
I mean in the third paragraph or so,
she says I betrayed my friend.
And then a couple of pages later she tells you,
I slept with my friend's boyfriend,
who ended up being her husband.
And this was like this horrible thing.
And was ridiculous.
And so you don't have-- you're not waiting
to find that information out.
It's like, I want to just kind of get that out of there,
get it out, and then the story is
about exploring other things.
So you're not waiting.
There's other suspense in the story.
And I'm happy to say that many people have told me they've
stayed up reading the book.
So there is suspense.
And I think suspense is such an interesting thing,
because there's a book that I love by Joan Silber
and I've taught this book in a suspense seminar I
did with the graduate students.
It's just very low key book.
It's called Household Words, and she kind of
laughed when I told her that I had
taught that book in the class, but there isn't anything.
It's a story of a life.
And just it's life and how it unfolds.
But just a story of a life can be very suspenseful.
Because it's like you're just churning up what is it
that makes this person do the next thing.
We're constantly making these negotiations in life,
and always there are these consequences.
And that's a wonderful, wonderful book, by the way.
Household Words.
I just-- I love that book.
And I love the Lydia Davis book, The End of the Story,
which is just a story about a woman
thinking about how this relationship ended.
And you know right in the beginning
that the relationship ended, but there's a lot of suspense,
because just the investigation of the human heart
is filled with suspense.
So it's fascinating.
I think we probably have time for one more,
if someone has one more question.
Thanks so much for reading to us.
That's great.
I wonder if you could talk a little bit.
You're a writer in Tucson, a professor
at the University of Arizona writing
about the writer in Tucson, a professor at the University
of Arizona.
I wonder if you could talk about autobiography
and what you explore and what you're
reluctant to incorporate into the work,
and how do you negotiate that?
Yes.
Well.
I wrote a book before that was set
sort of in a fictional place that was like Tucson,
and there were some people who taught
at a place that was like the University of Arizona,
and people said, oh, why didn't you
just make it the University of Arizona and make it Tucson?
And I can't even remember now what the name of the town was.
Seca, or something.
Maybe like Dry, you know?
And so I just thought, oh, I'm just--
it's fiction, and like I'm like totally--
for me like fiction and nonfiction are very different.
And so I'm in my fiction mode, and there isn't--
it's basically like there's a department chair,
but he's not the department chair
at this actual university.
He's like a fictional character.
And there are some people who are professors
and administrative people who show up here and there,
and they're all made up.
But they're all, I think, it's kind of like any job.
That they're-- I think occupations are interesting.
So I know about this occupation.
So I show some different facets of this occupation,
and plug in fictional versions of professors and so on.
And there's a fictional novel contest
that's being held by the University of Arizona.
And I just thought, it's just going to be a story.
So I don't know.
Is that a good enough answer?
That seems like a great spot.
I think that there are books for sale,
so I mean if you have access to afford books in this world,
you should buy these because they're 20% off.
And we'll sign them, possibly.
And you should all come out to the Natalie Diaz reading
on the 2nd of April.
Thank you all for coming, and another round
of applause for Elizabeth.
[APPLAUSE]