Emma Donoghue earned critical praise – and an Oscar nomination – for her novel “Room,” which she later adapted into a screenplay. She joins us to talk about her newest effort, “The Wonder,” the story of an 11-year-old girl who becomes a sensation when news gets out that she’s lived without eating for months.
Emma Donoghue on …
… what it takes to write a novel:
“I get the ideas for my books, and I jot down a little file on my phone and then I will return to that over and over, over the years, putting in ideas as they come to me, and saying things like, ‘Should it be set in past tense? Should the point of view be the old man?’ I mull over these decisions a lot, as well as about the plot decisions of what’s going to happen. I know this sounds cold-blooded compared with the writers that say they did the whole thing in a fugue state using a feather pen … but most of us are plotters, and a novel is a big thing. You have to put it together slowly like say a building. I know I need to plan or else the walls are going to fall down.”
