PV: I did do background writing of the sort you describe, particularly for characters that remained stubbornly obscure to me, but I didn't do that in advance of starting on the book. Rather, I tend to let characters emerge on the page, as I said, through thought and action, and then try to interpret their characters from what I have written. It's at that point that I might step away and write a history for them, and then use some of that information to deepen and inform both the character development and the progress of the story.
Q: Did you write the beginning of the book first? Or much later? How much rearranging of parts did you end up doing?
PV: I did write the beginning of the book first, but that's about the only part I wrote in sequence! The first chapter of the book was the first piece of writing I did for the book where I could tell that I had found the voice of the narrator and a tone that would be appropriate and sustainable. Once I did that, though, I proceeded by randomly dipping into my transcripts for anecdotes and incidents that intrigued me sufficiently that I wanted to write them into chapters. When I had a bunch of pieces, I started thinking about a logical sequence for them. Then the links started to emerge. The more I wrote, the more I cut and shaped. I knew that, eventually, I wanted a story that would have a strong narrative thrust, but I didn't write to an outline. Rather, I wrote what interested me and then edited and rewrote it to find the through-line.
