Notes from Margaret Atwood

Read your fiction out loud.

If there isn't something there, it's not gonna work. Look for the iron rod, what's the iron rod that's holding it all together? I have thrown away novels where there wasn't any there there. Think about the structure. There's the story and how you tell the story, and those are two very different things. Think of The Iliad and how Achilles starts his story. it starts in the middle of the Trojan War not at the beginning, there's a reason for that. How do you define a story? It's quite simple. Somebody doing something somewhere is a story.

Everybody has the same fear of the blank page but fear can be exciting.

Second book is always the worst because if the first one has been well received, you don't know who might be waiting in the shrubs.

Are there any topics off limit? Everything can be discussed by somebody. Writers shouldn't tackle things that are completely unknown to them. They will screw it up. Although Franz Kafka wrote America without ever having been here. But he was Franz Kafka after all.

Look up Margaret Atwoods review of GOT

The sentence 'this can't happen here' is never one I have ever believed in. It can happen everywhere.

What is the point of publishing if you don't want people interpreting your work?

I was a little less interested in what they looked like as opposed to what they thought, on whether her characters represented on screen are visually better in the movie or the series.

Capitalism without any checks and balances flattens everything in the pot because if the only motive is profit and you keep doing it, there's nothing left...if you turn everything to gold, theres nothing left to eat. Money is abstract, only good for what you can change it into....

Revolution refers to the wheel of Fortune, it revolves but doesn't end up in a horizontal plane where everyone is equal, if you're at the bottom of the wheel it's not very fun.

I would need to know their age and socioeconomic status and profession. Women are, I hate to say this, just like people - On what advice she would give to women.