Neither have I, before this, wrung a short story's neck till
it cried
"Novel!" But as you suspected, Doug, the idea had been with
me for some time, and I always thought of it as a short
novel. When Dennis commissioned a story, that gave me my
chance to (as you say) take it for a test drive. The longer
version is quite different, with much more attention to
character -- and many more characters -- though I tried to
retain the lean, stripped-down approach and language of the
story version. In most ways, DRIVE is my attempt to write a
contemporary Gold Medal-type novel.
As to THE LONG-LEGGED FLY, with its four sections set in
different decades, no, I didn't have that plan in mind from
the first. I wrote the first section as a short story, then
found myself so taken with the character, and wanting to know
so much more, that I wrote the second, which then seemed to
call for a third, and THEN I had to offer some sort of
resolution. The four sections form an arc, beginning as
fairly standard pulp fiction and circling ever more inward
towards a kind of autobiography for Lew. The series of six
novels is adumbrated in the first novel -- I had only to pick
out various threads and weave them together.
Jim
-- # Plain ASCII text only, please. Anything else won't show up. # To unsubscribe from the regular list, say "unsubscribe rara-avis" to # majordomo@icomm.ca. This will not work for the digest version. # The web pages for the list are at http://www.miskatonic.org/rara-avis/ .
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : 12 Feb 2004 EST