Charles Frazier: LibraryThing Author Interview

Can you tell us a bit about what settings or people inspired you to write Nightwoods?

I usually begin building characters by thinking about places or objects they might find important. So, an abandoned tourist lodge was the beginning of Luce, the book's main character. And Florida A1A north of Daytona helped lead to Stubblefield, a character I'd been writing some sketches about, particularly his cars and motorcycles. He began to seem like he should have a connection to north Florida.

This is the most modern of your novels so far; did you find it difficult, or easier, to write about the 20th century?

A little of both. With Cold Mountain and Thirteen Moons, when I got stuck I could always spend a day or two of research in the libraries at Duke and Chapel Hill and come back refreshed with new ideas, new period details to help with descriptions. I had hardly any of that with Nightwoods. On the other hand, I didn't have to learn all those details, I just had to remember them.

Are there any lines or scenes in the book of which you are especially fond?

I kind of like the way the first three sentences set up the main characters and suggest something about the tone and style of the book: "Luce's new stranger children were small and beautiful and violent. She learned early that it wasn't smart to leave them unattended in the yard with the chickens. Later she’d find feathers, a scaled yellow foot with its toes clinched."

What part of the book came to you first?

The setting, both place and time. The early 1960s, a lake with a town on one side and an old summer lodge on the other.

Which character or characters were the most difficult to fit into the story?

I cut several characters from the book entirely, so I guess they were the hardest.

Can you describe your writing process and habits for us?

I tend to read, exercise, and do errands in the morning and middle of the day. I try to start working no later than three in the afternoon and keep at it as long as I'm getting something done, usually about five or six hours. I don't write a novel in sequence and don't work from an outline. I spend more time revising than writing. I usually work seven days a week.

Which book by someone else do you wish you had thought of and written first and why?

Of living writers, maybe Cormac McCarthy's Suttree or Steven Millhauser's Edwin Mullhouse. Both books are so insistent on claiming their own worlds, so rich in detail and language. Which is why, of course, no one else could have written them: they are such pure products of individual memory and experience and personality and art.

What's on your bookshelves? What are you reading now?

I'm reading several books that have to do with the Greeks. Hesiod's Works and Days, Charles Freeman's The Greek Achievement, M.I. Finley's The World of Odysseus. My daughter, Annie, wrote a thesis on ancient Greek novels and knows a lot more about the Greeks than I do, so I'm just trying to stay in the conversation. In between, I'm reading Haruki Murakami's wonderful book of short stories, Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman.

Can you tell us something about your next project? What are you working on now?

I finished the final work on Nightwoods—the copyedits and galley passes—so recently that I haven't had time to think about it.

—interview by Jeremy Dibbell