After Katharine Weber published her sixth novel, Michael Silverblatt asks her on his podcast Bookworm, “Do you have secret methods?”
Well, Michael, probably my number one secret method is the not writing, and how much not writing I do that is part of my writing process, if I can use as grand a word as process. So it’s actually only when the not writing is even worse than writing that I am driven back to it.
I also enjoyed this characterization of how she learned to write, alluding to the title of her latest novel.
“Monkey see, monkey do” is probably a reasonable way of describing how I taught myself to write because I don’t have an MFA. I don’t actually have a college degree. I didn’t actually finish high school. So really, reading is how I taught myself to write… Reading novels led me to have a sense of the kind of novel I would like to write, which is the kind of novel I would like to read.
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