SALLY COOPER discusses the Writing Process | Author of Smells Like Heaven, With My Back to the World

Описание: Sally Cooper talks about the writing process. Shot in Hamilton, Ontario. Part of a longer interview from the series WRITERS' CONFESSIONS.
Sally Cooper has been published in numerous magazines, newspapers, and literary journals. Her first novel, "Love Object" (2002), received praise from critics and earned a devoted follower of readers. Cooper teaches Creative Writing at Humber College in Toronto, and lives in Hamilton, Ontario.
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Writers' Confessions is produced by Michael Glassbourg in collaboration with TraxSoundStudio in Hamilton, Ontario.

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Transcription:

"Well, the first book in a certain sense, you're in a state of grace because you don't know what you're doing, and you're just forging ahead. You have no sense of how long the process will take. And it's all new. You're finding your way. And you're very much just doing it your way, or I felt that anyway, and I was quite intuitive about the writing process, then. With the second book, having gone through it, I had set some goals for myself. And I had thought about, "Well, maybe these were some weaknesses with the first book, or some things I didn't try that I want to try, some challenges." So I had those in mind. So there were there. And just a really strong sense of wanting to do it differently and wanting the book to be a kind of a different thing. And also, an awareness of what it now feels like to be published and to have it out in the world. And very conscious of, "Okay,"... See, with the first one, there was never any guarantee it would ever be published, so there was all of this free freedom there. Not that there was a guarantee with the second one either. But still, just a sense that, "If this makes it out, these are the things that will happen." And I want to make sure that when it comes out, it is the absolute best I can do at the time. Well, talking about revelation, I think this goes back to being an intuitive writer and perhaps having a plan for the story or the novel, but being open to tangents and places that the novel might go or the story might go that you hadn't expected, and sometimes, those places will reveal aspects of the story or the character that even as a writer you hadn't expected. Every time I've written anything, I've had the experience of going back and seeing things in the writing that I didn't deliberately put there, but that are there. And there are wonderful little realizations, or moments, or revelations that I didn't plan for. As a reader, I like to... Certainly, in a story or anything that I read, it's almost an unfolding of a character just how these moments where an author has said something in a way I might not have thought to say it. And it's something that I may have thought or felt, but never really had a name for. I never really kind of qualified it. And if a writer can do that through a character, that's when that moment of recognition comes from me as a reader, and I feel that the writer's done something successful. I guess, as a writer, I think it's important always to feel challenged. And any project that comes along has to be contain within it a particular challenge or something that is going to stretch the writer. And the best writing comes from a writer that's in that place, who's looking for that challenge and who is really sort of pushing himself or herself and living on that edge of what I can't do. What can I do? What can't I do? And how do I get up there."

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