Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Margaret Atwood on the novelist’s writing process: “you can never actually meet the author of the book you have just read”

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

“The premise is that the writer knows herself, knows her art, but the truth is that my fiction writing process is not always entirely conscious. I do not always know the why. The great joy in writing fiction comes during the magical moments of being transported, of being blissfully lost in one’s imaginative space. And those moments are difficult to distill into intellectually coherent explanations. And so I have had to invent answers to the sorts of questions writers are often asked, about my process, my choices, my characters. In inventing those answers, sometimes I believe myself, and sometimes I don’t.” —Eudora Welty Lecture, November 8, 2017, minutes 18-20: https://www.c-span.org/video/?437019-2/chimamanda-ngozi-adichie-delivers-eudora-welty-lecture

Margaret Atwood
“…the mere act of writing splits the self in two…What is the relationship between the two entities we lump under one name, that of ‘the writer’?…By two, I mean the person who exists when no writing is going forward…and that other, more shadowy and altogether more equivocal personage who shares the same body, and who, when no one is looking, takes over and uses it to commit the actual writing…All writers are double…you can never actually meet the author of the book you have just read…” —Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing. New York, Anchor/Random House, 2002.