Emma Hooper “I’ve got an obsessive nature when it comes to the rhythm of the words and I’ll have sentences that are perfectly grammatically correct, but it has to have just the right amount of syllables.”
[ in an interview with ‘The Bookseller’ magazine, October 17, 2014]

Debut novelist Emma Hooper is also a musician, and this shows, she says in her style of writing. Her first novel, Etta and Otto and Russell and James, was published in January 2015. Some of her chapters are very short, just a paragraph or two on a page with lots of empty white space. “It’s like when you play a symphony or a concerto,” she tells The Bookseller, “or even an album, it’s one long piece, but the white space between the songs or between the movements is very important. You need a minute to digest and then move on.”

To read my review of Etta and Otto and Russell and James, click here.
Click here to read The Bookseller article in full.

See how these other novelists write:-
Mary Gaitskill
Bill Clegg
Anne Tyler

‘Etta and Otto and Russell and James’ by Emma Hooper [UK: Fig Tree]

And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
Why #author Emma Hooper writes with ‘white space’ http://wp.me/p5gEM4-1tm via @SandraDanby