![]() ![]() I think I was probably trying to run away from the possible reception or failure of Scenes, so I started research on a new project. I had a Fulbright and wanted to write about memory and slavery in a comparative frame. How soon after your first book, Scenes of Subjection (1997), did you begin researching and writing your next, Lose Your Mother (2007)?Ī week after Scenes came out, I was on a plane to Ghana. When writing I will ask what are some of the key terms that I’m thinking with, or that I’m writing against. I am very committed to a storied articulation of ideas, but working with concepts as building blocks enables me to think about situation and character as well as my own key terms. I think of my work as bridging theory and narrative. Sometimes that means there are things that I think I’m going to write about that I actually can’t write about once I encounter the particular material, or sometimes it just takes me in a direction that I wasn’t expecting to go in at all. ![]() ![]() I think partly it’s because of the way I engage archival materials. I have an impression of the kind of thing I might want to do, and that’s very clear, as opposed to having a full outline of the book. I work intuitively and will follow a trail of documents or my instincts until the project emerges. Outlining may be too formal a description. What is your outlining process like when starting a book? ![]()
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