Caroline Leavitt, bestselling author of the wonderful novels Pictures of You and Is This Tomorrow, among others, recently interviewed me about my new novel, GOLDEN STATE (Feb. 4). Here, we talk about structuring a novel–how much you know of the structure before you begin, and the challenges of writing a novel that takes place in a single day.

CL:  Golden State takes place across one day, and yet in that day, whole lives are really lead. I deeply admired the masterful way you played with time, breaking it apart, in order to give us pieces of different stories before we got to the whole. Did you always know this was the structure? How difficult was it to write?

MR: The story began, really, with the idea of the main character, Julie, making her way across town on a broken ankle over the course of a single day. I wanted to use this structure to allow Julie, who is about to turn forty, to reflect on how she got to this point in her life–the mistakes she’s made, the people she has loved, the path she has taken. While I’ve never written a novel set in a single day before, I tend to write in a similar pattern–of present action interspersed with reflection–in all of my novels. It’s just the most natural-feeling way for me to write a story, perhaps because I am always so interested (not just in novels, but also in life) about where people came from, what made them who they are.

With Golden State, however, an extra wrinkle was added–a hostage situation that’s taking place at the hospital where Julie works. It was quite challenging to figure out where the pieces fit. Writing a novel, as you know, is like putting together a huge puzzle. I actually laid the chapters out on my dining room floor for weeks at a time, during various phases of the process, to figure out where things went.

Read Caroline’s interview here.   Read an excerpt from Golden State.

Buy the book:  Indiebound    Amazon 

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