"They steered the boy through the holes and tunnels until they could see the pale light of a sleeping chamber. Wehn they were almost to the surface, my father paused in the darkness, as if held back by a kind of gravity. Years later, in the dim light of Roscoe's, he would tell me that he felt a pain he hadn't felt before, the pain of something inside himsefl dying. He knew he had lost part of himself underground that day. What remained climbed up to the sunlight, and the rest of his life."
That’s a clausterphobic climb through the memories of Danielle Trussoni's father, a soldier who climbed through mazes of tunnels in Vietnam.
In her recent memoir, Trussoni turned her father's stories into a crisp, vivid narrative--you can read the results for yourself in Falling Through the Earth. The book examines her troubled childhood, where she struggled with divorce, poverty and her father’s demons from the Vietnam War.
Today, Trussoni shows us how she shaped her father's stories into an award winning book (one of the New York Times’ top ten books of the year). Welcome to my deceptively simple feature, Five Easy Questions. In the spirit of Jack Nicholson’s mad piano player, I run a weekly set of quality interviews with writing pioneers—delivering some practical, unexpected advice about web publishing.
Jason Boog:
This memoir depended on a vast amount of research about a piece of history that you did not experience first-hand. Any advice for a fledgling writer looking to conduct this kind of research? Continue reading...
Danielle Trussoni:
My advice is to do much more research than you need to do and then forget it.
Cramming research into a piece of writing is the first way to kill the magic.
Believing in your own aesthetic intuition is much more important than pasting laundry lists of facts into your work, especially if you are a literary writer.
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» "Do much more research than you need to do and then forget it" : How To Use Research Your Book from ThePublishingSpot
"They steered the boy through the holes and tunnels until they could see the pale light of a sleeping chamber. Wehn they were almost to the surface, my father paused in the darkness, as if held back by a kind... [Read More]
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