Interview

William Norris talks briefly about the story behind the writing of his first novel, Snapshots.

Before I started Snapshots I had never tried to write a novel. The form seemed daunting, and I couldn’t wrap my mind around its demands or the level of commitment required to see a novel length work through to completion. Instead, I wrote short fiction, much of it, in retrospect, not very good short fiction, and sent my pieces off to journals and magazines without success.

During that time, I wrote four or five stories with the same cast of characters; a family called the Mahoneys. There were four children, and I had written pieces narrated by three of them. I begin to envision a collection of linked stories narrated by each member of the family, but found myself blocked when I attempted to write a story told by Nora, the youngest member of the clan. I sat down each writing day, determined to get Nora’s voice right on the page, but when I read the work over the next morning, it was clear that I wasn’t even close. Everything I tried felt flat and forced.

Then, one morning in the summer of 1997, I typed, "Nora wakes first and toddles to the television hulking silently in the living room." It was the first time I had come at these characters in the third person, and the first time I had written about ...