About David Mitchell and Black Swan Green
The Scotsman talks to David Mitchell, whose most recent book is Black Swan Green (link from Bookslut last month). What’s nice about the article is that it isn’t a dissection of the book, rather a conversation that includes it. There’s some good stuff on writing a novel from one’s life:
Black Swan Green does not traffic in veiled autobiography and wish-fulfilment.
“I kind of evolved a distinction between a personal novel and an autobiographical one,” says Mitchell, leaning forward on his elbows and speaking softly. “A personal one is where the protagonist and the writer have many things in common. An autobiographical one is where events and everyone around the protagonist or the narrator come largely from life.”
And the difficulty of writing in first person:
So, if you write a book in the first person, you can’t give any information to the reader that the protagonist doesn’t know - unless you smuggle it either through the narrator’s stupidity, or, in the case of Jason, this device of him not knowing what he knows.