The first sentence of every novel should be: Trust me, this will take time but there is order here, very faint, very human. Meander if you want to get to town.
Truth, at the wrong time, can be dangerous.
You don't want to write your own opinion, you don't want to just represent yourself, but represent yourself through someone else.
As a writer, one is busy with archaeology.
Research can be a big clunker. It's difficult to know how you can make the historical light.
Right now, I have no idea what I will write or if I will write again.
You're getting everyone's point of view at the same time, which, for me, is the perfect state for a novel: a cubist state, the cubist novel.
I see the poem or the novel ending with an open door.
The past is still, for us, a place that is not safely settled.
When you're writing, it's as if you're within a kind of closed world.
Once I've discovered the story, I might restructure it, maybe move things around, set up a clue that something is going to happen later, but that happens much later in an editorial capacity.
To write about someone like myself would be very limiting.
You want to suggest something new, but at the same time, resolve the drama of the action in the novel.
That's Anil's path. She grows up in Sri Lanka, goes and gets educated abroad, and through fate or chance gets brought back by the Human Rights Commission to investigate war crimes.
It doubles your perception, to write from the point of view of someone you're not.
The last three books are much more a case of a moment of history, what happened almost by accident or coincidence, like being in the same elevator or lifeboat.
I tend not to know what the plot is or the story is or even the theme. Those things come later, for me.
It's why you create characters: so you can argue with yourself.
I don't have a plan for a story when I sit down to write. I would get quite bored carrying it out.
I'm a Canadian citizen. But I always want to feel at home in Sri Lanka. I'm a member of both countries.
