Addicted to Writing Fiction
PW Talks with Peter Abrahams
by Leonard Picker -- Publishers Weekly, 3/13/2006
What do you enjoy about writing fiction?
The truth is, I think I'm an addict. Whereas with drug or alcohol addicts it's all about putting something in themselves, with me, I have to put something out of myself. I have to produce a few pages every day to feel content. When you write fiction, you're entering an imaginative world. There's a technique part of me that's watching, but there's an imaginative part of me that's in the story. I like to visit that place every day.
When did this "addiction" start?
It didn't actually manifest itself until I started writing novels, although I experienced a version of it earlier on without fully realizing what it was I wanted to do. Before writing, I was an avid spearfisherman in the Bahamas and worked in radio. When I was younger, I liked reading Stevenson, Twain, Graham Greene and Ross Macdonald. My mother, Enid Abrahams, who wrote teleplays for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, taught me a lot—for example, the importance of being original.
Why do you find writing crime fiction challenging?
It's from what I liked when I was a kid—I like a strong, entertaining narrative, and I love suspense, reading the kind of book where you stay up all night because you can't stop, and that's what I like to write. That being said, I'd like to point out that I really pushed against the confines of crime fiction, because while I want to entertain and produce a book you can't stop reading, I want to present thematic material, too, and I think the potential of crime fiction has not been fully tapped.
Could you expand on that?
I think you can write a novel that's not only about crime but can even feature a classic fair-play solution, that at the same time can talk about contemporary life as much as any other kind of novel. I think End of Story [Reviews, Feb. 27] is an example of this. If you stand way back from it, it's an amateur sleuth story, but I tried to make the story feel very, very real, so that there isn't going to be a scene where the heroine, through physical prowess, overcomes somebody—that's just not gonna happen.
Have you ever seriously considered other solutions or endings for your novels?
In this form, there are times when you can throw in one twist too many that really doesn't serve the story. There have been occasions where a wrinkle I've thought of, or been asked about by an editor, just felt too contrived to me. It's important that the plot developments be consistent with the voices of the characters I've created.
