One of the pleasures of preparing to re-release Winter Haven has been to add a new forward. Here is a brief excerpt.
People ask how I get ideas for novels. It’s not an easy question to answer. Each story is different, and comes in its own way. I’m not even certain when or how some of the ideas start. Sometimes I just seem to notice them already fully formed and waiting in my imagination.
But every story idea does begin somehow, of course, and thinking back I realize the idea for Winter Haven was planted many years ago when a journalist with The New York Times interviewed me about one of my early novels. The interview did not go well. At first the journalist seemed pleasant enough, but I sensed something was bothering him. Eventually he got around to it.
“In your story,” said the journalist, “You have this man accused of murder and he tells his wife about it, and she says they should pray. Do you seriously think anyone would bother praying at a time like that?”
To this day it remains the most surprising question anyone has ever asked me in an interview. Of course one expects creative twists and turns from a journalist with such rarified credentials. But I wasn’t startled by the question’s creativity. On the contrary, at first I thought he must be joking. Surely nobody would be sincerely skeptical that a character might pray in a dangerous situation. Then I realized he was actually serious, and the atmosphere between us seemed to roll back like a curtain to reveal a topsy-turvy world. He didn’t merely have a different point of view; he came from a kind of Wonderland where the basic facts of life are utterly ignored.
I wouldn’t have been much of a novelist if something like that didn’t show up in a book someday.
