Elizabeth Strout: ‘I learnt a long time ago to just sit down and take whatever emotion was most pressing in me and transpose it into a character. Then the scene would have life to it, as opposed to feeling wooden.”
[in an interview with ‘Culture’ magazine, part of ‘The Sunday Times’ newspaper, April 30, 2017]

Pulitzer Prize winner for Olive Kitteridge, Elizabeth Strout works at a dining room table covered in scraps of paper, with four different chairs. She always starts with a character then a scene. She writes in longhand. She never writes from beginning to end.

Read my reviews of My Name is Lucy Barton and Anything is Possible, both by Elizabeth Strout. Read more about Strout at her website.

 

‘Anything is Possible’ by Elizabeth Strout [UK: Viking]

See how these other authors write:-
Mary Gaitskill
Hanya Yanagihara
Bill Clegg

And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
How #author @LizStrout writes via @SandraDanby #writing http://wp.me/p5gEM4-2yW