Interview with a Hero of Mine

I admire David Mitchell hugely, his writing and his approach. (plus he lives near my in laws and was brought up near where and when I was too and I met him too this year, geek geek)

There's a (long) fascinating interview with him in the Paris Review here. Check out what he says about structure, about voice, about lots of things.

Get the structure wrong and you blow up shortly after takeoff. Get it right and you save yourself an aborted manuscript and months and months of wasted writing. Make your structure original and you may end up with a novel that looks unlike any other.

and

Dialogue can be a revealing tool—you can smuggle in a lot about your characters simply by their choice of words.

and

Startling is OK—provided it’s not so startling that the reader dumps the book in the charity shop unfinished.

There's this facebook page here, not sure how legit it is...

and an interview with therumpus

I can’t leave a book alone. I need very patient people at the printers and the typesetters—I always find things that begin to work themselves out when I’m writing, or rather after I’ve written. “Maybe” or “perhaps”—or perhaps “possibly?” They’re all quite different, though, aren’t they? The same word, but one glance of the eyeball and sometimes it needs to be “maybe” and other times it needs to be “perhaps.” I don’t quite know why, but you do have a sense when you’re in the voice.