Interview

Colum McCann discusses the relevance of fiction, what he's doing to ensure women's voices are key players in his work and his favorite aspect of being a writer.

Elizabeth Strout: I love the wide range of your narratives, how you dare to cover so many aspects of world events through the personal stories of those involved. How do you make the decision to end where you end, and begin where you begin? Is this an intuitive sense for you?

Colum McCann: Writing is very much about the intuitive, the gut instinct, the shotgun leap into the unknown. Most of the time, I don't necessarily know where I'm going. I have a general goal, an end-line, but I'm not sure how it is that I'm going to get there. Being too conscious of a journey brings a malady to it. You can overthink it sometimes. It's better to go with the gut feeling.

I think it's very much akin to being an adventurer or an explorer. You know you want to find new territory. The nature of its newness makes it inherently exciting. You cast yourself out in a small boat in the hope that you will get somewhere. Most of the time you end up capsizing or catching the wrong current or, even worse, ship-wrecking. But every now and then—when the words are moving, and the sentences begin to align themselves, and the imaginative intent has caught fire with language—you strike new land. A sort of Galá...