N.B.

I felt that I had been mistaken in the way I'd been going about trying to write novels. I would start with a hero who was in a certain setting, and then the plot would crank into motion. All of a sudden, all the things that I was interested in would be marginalized. Eventually I gave up on the plot part. I just had him go through his lunch hour because that seemed the most efficient way to say the things I had saved up to say. The plot has to be very tiny for me to pay any attention to it for some reason. As soon as my narrators focus on something, they seem to lose track of the fact that they're supposed to be part of some momentous chain of events.

-- Nicholson Baker discussing The Mezzanine with Alexander Laurence and David Strauss at The Write Stuff.

Comments

[Robert]

N.B. That's why N.B. writes like that. He's at his best when he focuses on something plotless, like paperclips or (my fave) his vague envy of John Updike. Gotta grant him that stopping time à la The Fermata was a cool conceit, though.

[gatsby]

spy plane

[alexander]

Cool