Margaret Atwood - "By writing, you are following a very long tradition."
“When I wrote The Handmaid’s Tale, nothing went into it that had not happened in real life somewhere at some time.
“The reason I made that rule is that I didn’t want anybody saying, ‘You certainly have an evil imagination, you made up all these bad things.’
“I didn’t make them up.”
(From video for her MasterClass.)
Margaret Atwood also notes writing and writers are part of an enduring human endeavor: telling stories.
She comments:
“By writing, you are following a very long tradition – setting spoken words down on a surface that allows other people to “read” them, thus translating them back into spoken words.
But you are also part of a very much longer tradition – that of story-telling.
Story-telling may be one of the oldest human things we do.
We do it all the time, in so many ways – even the answers to “How was your day?” and “When did you first notice the symptoms?” are stories.”
She continues:
“A novel is simply a long story told in a way that – we hope – inspires the desire in the reader, or…
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