There are so many people who don't know small towns exist. When I write, I want to give my readers two things: one is a sense of consolation, and two, I want to make them laugh.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
I tend to write about towns because that's what I remember best. You can put a boundary on the number of characters you insert into a small town. I tend to create a lot of characters, so this is a sort of restraint on the character building I do for a novel.
I think there are people who really love the comfort of their small town, and there are people who feel stuck by it.
I use the setting of a small rural Norwegian community - the kind of place that I know so intimately. I could never write a novel set in a big city, because, frankly, I don't know what it would be like.
I didn't want to spend the next thirty years writing about bad things happening in the same small town - not least of all because people would begin to wonder why anyone still lives there!
You cannot save wonderful towns. You can only save wonderful towns by building new ones.
I go back to a very specific aspect of the Midwest - small towns surrounded by farmland. They make a good stage for what I like to write about, i.e., roads and houses, bridges and rivers and weather and woods, and people to whom strange or interesting things happen, causing problems they must overcome.
I write about people in small towns; I don't write about people living in big cities. My kind of storytelling depends upon people that have time to talk to each other.
A small town is a place where there's no place to go where you shouldn't.
When I read 'To Kill a Mockingbird,' I was so struck by the universality of small towns.
Country people give me more than writers, and country places than towns.