Carol Anshaw

Carol Anshaw is the author of the novels Seven Moves, Aquamarine, Lucky in the Corner, and the newly released Carry the One. She has won the Carl Sandburg, Society of Midland Authors, and Ferro-Grumley awards for fiction, and has been a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award three times.

From her Q & A with Sarah Terez Rosenblum for "Our Town" blog at the Chicago Sun-Times:

OT: Your new book, Carry the One spans nearly thirty years. It’s the story of an accident’s aftermath and its ripple effect.

CA I don’t know if I’ve ever told you this, but I started with these three siblings maybe twenty years ago. I wrote about them —two [stories] appeared in Best American-- but I didn’t know how the stories were going to hook up.

OT That might surprise some people who think you need to write linearly.

CA Oh, no. I never write in a linear way. And I tell students not to. You can only know so much about a book when you first start. I try to get all that down, all that’s available to me. And then see what I need. See what I don’t have. If I just started on page one and went to page two-fifty that would be a deadly process.

OT There’s this scientist who talks about using fractals to write a novel, something like that. He calls it the Snowflake Method. Inherent in what he tells people is this idea that if you rewrite you’re wasting time. So he wants you to outline so much that your book is almost there before you begin to write.

CA Oh that sounds...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue