Ask the Author: Jean Hackel
Answered Questions (9)
Jean Hackel
I read at random, without lists. Sometimes I'll read a book over and over again to get a sense of its architecture or to explore its sources. Other books I'll read once and move on, gaining at the very least another view of a subject. I just finished Leaving Coy's Hill (about the life of abolitionist and suffragette Lucy Stone). Before that I read La Familia Grande multiple times. Now I'm reading L'Été des quatre rois, an historical novel by Camille Pascal about the French Revolution of 1830.
Jean Hackel
I'd go to the Belle Epoque of Proust's long novel and wander, invisible, through that world on the edge of extinction, a world that could have led to more and more beauty if only the minds that directed it hadn't succumbed to boredom, pride, greed, and procedure.
Jean Hackel
Horror is not my genre. There's too much horror in the world. Some people find fictional horror a psychological release from real horror, I think, but that release doesn't happen for me. Here's what I consider horror: "Billy was only two years old when he killed for the first time. His mama hated him, that was for sure, so he made himself feel better by squishing the life out of it."
Jean Hackel
Writer's block occurs when a writer sits down and says to himself, "Well, now I'll write." It doesn't work that way for me. I play out stories in my mind. At any given time I'll have a half-dozen stories that come and go. When a thought hits, a line of dialogue, an argument that demands to be written down, I'll write it on paper, even if I have to get up in the middle of the night. For years, my writing didn't go anywhere. The stories petered out. I couldn't sustain them, organize them cohesively into a beginning, a middle, and an end. Then suddenly I could.
Jean Hackel
We live in two worlds, the outer world we deal with by necessity, and the inner world we explore if we are brave. At his trial for "impiety and corrupting youth," Socrates is supposed to have said, "The unexamined life is not worth living." That's a harsh way of putting it, but the truth is that the person in our life of whom we know the least is often ourself. Writing is a form of analysis. The writer cannot help revealing who he is, not only to the reader but to his own inner critic. Hence the need for courage.
Jean Hackel
I'm currently working on a fictional memoir, writing about the life of my grandmother in the first person, as if I were my grandmother. It's given me a different perspective on who she was. I find myself in tears at times, wondering how I could have missed so much about her.
Jean Hackel
My advice is to let thoughts and ideas come to you. Imagine a scenario, as if it's a movie and you're the director. Play out a problem. Let's suppose you've had an argument with someone. Replay the argument, but in a different way. Cast your characters. You may be played by your favorite actor. The other person is played by a different actor. The setting is different. Describe it in words. Now let your actors talk. Try the scene with various dialogue, various outcomes. Have fun with the process. There's no such thing as writer's block when you're having fun. You may even find you look back on the real life argument in a different way.
Jean Hackel
I've always written as a way to organize thoughts, to see where a particular line of reasoning takes me. We all tend to seek solutions to problems in life, whether they're our own particular problems or the problems of society. Often our solutions don't work in the long run. We look back and admit, "Well, I hadn't considered that aspect," or "I hadn't anticipated that reaction from others." Writing is a way of projecting whether our ideas will work in the real world. Writing is thinking subjected to scrutiny.
Jean Hackel
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