“Who knows what prompts a person to write? Thank the gods it’s mostly a mysterious process. When I sit down and confront the yawning white screen, I usually allow myself to fall backward, away from it, into my own life memories. I ruthlessly scrabble through all those extreme times—beautiful, puzzling, grubby, fragmentary, terrifying, gut wrenching, shaming—and drag one out into the daylight. Then I proceed to push it in any direction that feels good to me. I might veer off sideways, or tell the story up to the point of my memory, or use my memory as the launch pad. I ask myself what sort of person would act in this nutty, usually ill advised, pumped up version of the truth. Then I plunge in, and I’m off. Life is often much more weird and random than fiction, but with fiction you can do something unspeakable, if you like, and then press save and print. There’s no obvious mess to clear up. It’s exhilarating; there are no limits.”
—Deborah Kay Davies, author of True Things About Me (Faber & Faber, 2011)
Photo credit: Euron Jones