Ask the Author: Katherine Russell
Answered Questions (4)
Katherine Russell
In his bestseller *Outliers*, Malcolm Gladwell suggests that 10,000 hours of deliberate practice can propel you to greatness. This may stand true for many areas of study, but writing is different. Yes, quality writing requires practice -- lots of deliberate, painstaking practice -- but you cannot sustain this while writing about nothing. You need to continuously learn about the world, yourself, science, politics, history, or whatever interests and engages you and helps you understand what is necessary to capture, decode, heal, enhance, and rekindle the human experience. If you are not born into a story that must be shared, then create one. If you do not have insight yet but you have the urge to write, then take the world in with modesty and keep asking questions until you find one that hasn't yet been answered. Seek out a niche you can study. If you do not have a purpose for sharing what or who you are beyond the fact that you love writing, then find something more to move your limbs to that keyboard every day. There are millions of books out there; some will remain untouched until they become dust. Yet, instead of competing for attention, yearning for aggrandizement, work toward saying something that hasn't been said before.
Katherine Russell
I'm currently gathering reentry stories from formerly incarcerated individuals in order to convey the current realities of our prison system. What will become of those stories, I'm still deciding.
Katherine Russell
The best way to get inspired is to read and learn something new. Then, let it stir inside you for a while until you understand how you fit into it. Our culture encourages us to immediately react to inspiration by posting something on social media - I say that's a waste. Give it time to aerate and open up; work with it until it takes you somewhere better.
Katherine Russell
I didn't set out to write a novel; I set out to learn more about our world through writing. I wanted to have a discussion about Islam in a more positive context than our current media is giving. I wanted to walk in another woman's shoes in a culture with different - yet ofttimes parallel - values and truths from my own. And I wanted to understand what it is to be an imperialized culture in a neocolonial world, where my own country is ever the imperialist. I drew my ideas from observing the people around me; my peers post-college intent on 'saving' the world, the romanticized version of this story that keeps getting told over and over. I wanted to show another side of it - the side where we don't save; we learn.
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