Ask the Author: Patricia Bernstein
Answered Questions (10)
Patricia Bernstein
I had not thought seriously of writing fiction. I thought I was a non-fiction writer, but, when I was in Scotland in 2014, I heard an amazing story about a persecuted Catholic noblewoman who rescued her husband from the Tower of London the night before his scheduled execution, with the help of her women friends! I thought it was a story just begging to be dramatized and decided to try my luck.
Patricia Bernstein
Good question. I always tell budding writers to be careful what topic you choose. You better LOVE it, because you will be living with it for a very long time. My first book, a collection of first-person accounts of childbirth from the 1890s to the 1990s, was inspired by my own experience having children 18 years apart. The second was inspired by a photograph of a lynching. The third by one line I read in a history book about a 29-year old Texas district attorney who won the first serious convictions of Klansmen in the 1920s. For the fourth, see below.
Patricia Bernstein
Very different from my current novel. This story is set in 1194 and features my first front-and-center Jewish character.
Patricia Bernstein
Read, read, read, read, read. Writers learn how to write by reading.
Patricia Bernstein
Two things: the feeling of being the most alive and using all of whatever gifts I have when I'm writing, and leaving something behind, other than my beloved daughters, when I go.
Patricia Bernstein
Usually words just flow because I've been thinking about each scene long before I start to write. But I do sometimes get stuck. So...more thought, more testing out phrases, even more research, to unclench the gears.
Patricia Bernstein
I had always wanted to live alone, unburdened by the demands of other people. But I had not expected the Noises.
Patricia Bernstein
Among my all-time favorite books are Herman Wouk's "The Winds of War" and "War and Remembrance." I could see myself joining in a fearless and passionate fight to save European Jews from the Holocaust.
Patricia Bernstein
I don't know about summer, but there are so many fine books I never seem to get to. I must at last read something by Gabriel Garcia Marquez--either "One Hundred Years of Solitude" or "Love in the Time of Cholera."
Patricia Bernstein
Why on earth did a salesman from Tennessee, raised in a fundamentalist Baptist church, marry my Jewish grandmother in 1913--in a time when Presbyterians didn't marry Methodists!
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