Sarah Weinman linked to a new interview of Robert B. Parker by Benjamin Ivry at the Bloomberg syndicate. Of course, read any three interviews of Parker, and you notice he has his answers down cold.
The one slight exception in this interview dealt with his writing routine/output:
My life is spent, every day, for much of a day, in a world of fiction. And when I get through doing that, I have no brain left for fiction. I'll read some nonfiction, and I'll read the newspaper, and I'll watch a ball game, but I don't read very much fiction anymore...I write 10 pages a day. When I'm done with it that day, it's what you see on the printed page. Maybe the spelling is improved or the punctuation changed, but essentially you're looking at my first draft. I don't do a second draft.
After reading Sarah's full entry, I commented:
For a long while, Parker's routine was five pages a day. It sounds as if writing is even more a part of his life now, and I don't think that's a good thing in his case. I take his comment that he lives in a world of fiction to mean he has little time to engage in real life. And real life (day job, errands, etc.) has to permeate fiction to make it seem real enough.
Living largely in conditions of his own construction, it's no wonder Parker so rarely rings true to me.
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