Why She Doesn't Write Novels

Award-winning poet Rosanna Warren (who visits tomorrow, April 12) explains to literary blogger Louis Mayeux why she doesn't write novels:

"I wrote stories all through my teens, and dug myself fairly deep into a novel the year after graduating from college. But in the middle of that story, I quite suddenly realized — after reading Gertrude Stein's 'Ida'— that I had no idea what I was doing. I stopped it cold. Now I write fiction only in my dreams. I could no more write a novel than I could build a 747 in the back yard. One of my main qualms about fiction was my panicky sense that I didn't know how to move my characters through the door from one room to another. It seemed too laborious." More.