In the sense that writing is to retrieve the past and stop the passing of time, all writing is about loss. It's not nostalgia in the sense of yearning to bring back the past, but recognition of the erosion of things as you live.
From Romesh Gunesekera
For me, there is urgency in fiction, even though writing is, in itself, an act against the corrosiveness of time.
It seems to me that we live in dangerous times all over the world: we have the technology to remember everything but a desire to forget the troubling and to seek the safety of numbness. Fiction can do something about that.
Whether it is better to forget and let wounds heal or remember and learn from the past is a crucial question for all of us, wherever we are.
To my mind, forgetting is a risky strategy for living. Memory is essential to us. It is DNA. We need to remember, and we need to imagine. That's why we have books, writing, fiction.
If you are writing something, you automatically create a certain distance. It can be very little. Even within the same city you imaginatively have a certain distance from your subject, and at the same time, you have to have a connection.
Who controls the present controls the past. There's a power structure, if you like, between the present and the past and the future, and that's what I'm interested in.
A novel means a new way of doing a story. If you go back the origins of a novel, 'Clarissa' - that's not a novel; it's just a bunch of letters. But it isn't! Because it's organised in a particular way! A novel is what you make of it.
Language is the means by which we negotiate our relationship with time.
I believe if a sentence is to retain its strength over time, it needs to be carefully made.
8 perspectives
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