Learn more about the book and author at Scott Sparling's website and blog.Many of your scenes are bursting with physicality, especially your characters’ in-the-moment experiences with drugs and sex. Do you have any advice on putting such intense physicality on the page?
I’m not sure I have any advice, other than reading a lot. It’s hard to get that stuff right. I remember Robert Stone saying that the description of a fight is always more of a poem than prose, and that was useful to me. I think the same applies to sex. I also learned some things by watching how fight scenes are cut in movies–there’s some purposeful confusion to a lot of fight scenes on the screen.
The early drafts focused mostly on trains. I wrote about freights in what I hoped was a powerful way. That was Harp’s world. I wanted Harp and Lane to be equal forces, so for that to work, Lane’s world had to be equally vivid. That meant writing about glue and sex with equal intensity. I’m not sure exactly how it’s done, which kind of scares me. A lot of it fell on the page when I was writing in my treehouse after...[read on]
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