David Guterson on Changing His Style
In Conversation with Mitzi Rapkin on the First Draft Podcast
First Draft: A Dialogue of Writing is a weekly show featuring in-depth interviews with fiction, nonfiction, essay writers, and poets, highlighting the voices of writers as they discuss their work, their craft, and the literary arts. Hosted by Mitzi Rapkin, First Draft celebrates creative writing and the individuals who are dedicated to bringing their carefully chosen words to print as well as the impact writers have on the world we live in.
In this episode, Mitzi talks to David Guterson about his new novel, Evelyn in Transit.
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From the episode:
Mitzi Rapkin: The style that you wrote the whole novel, that especially came out as your two main characters were on journeys, it had short sentences and short vignettes. I was wondering if that was stylistically important for this story and this book?
David Guterson: Well, this book is, I think, very different, stylistically, specifically different from Snow Falling on Cedars, but also different from everything I’ve done before. It’s much more spare, it’s much more straightforward. It has cleaner sentences, it’s less mellifluous, less dense. I structured this book as a juxtaposition of two lives unfolding. So, you’ve got Evelyn’s life and you’ve got Tsering’s life, and you start with both of them at a very, very young age, and you watch as they get older. The way that that’s delivered to the reader is as a series of moments. So rather than this sense of life unfolding, sort of like an endless river with everything connected, the structure of this book is to view significant, seminal telling moments in the lives of these two people, each of which reveals more about who they are and also drives them forward on their paths. And so that’s why the book is divided up into these sort of vignettes, is that I’m building portraits of two lives by selecting particular moments in those lives and letting each one speak in some way about the person and reveal more about where they’re going.
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David Guterson is the author of thirteen books, including the PEN/Faulkner Award winner Snow Falling on Cedars, which was made into a major motion picture, translated into twenty–five languages, and has sold more than 4 million copies worldwide. He lives on Bainbridge Island, Washington. His new novel is Evelyn in Transit.
First Draft: A Dialogue on Writing
First Draft: A Dialogue on Writing is a literary podcast produced and hosted by Mitzi Rapkin. Each episode features an in-depth interview with a fiction, non-fiction, essay, or poetry writer. The show is equal parts investigation into the craft of writing and conversation about the topics of an author’s work.
