Friday, September 05, 2014

"history was made by real people who were having a bad day"

Nicola Griffith:

Saints are not nice people. I don’t think they can afford to be sweet as pie or they wouldn’t become famous. You don’t get to be a saint without being famous. So I had to figure out: How would a woman from (the seventh century) and those circumstances become famous?

To do that I had to build this world and put this child inside and grow her, basically, as if she was in a terrarium, and just see what happened. Every time she got to do something that was impossible in those times, I would have to start again and every time she did something that was just too nice, I would have to back up.

I swear there's a great Paul Goodman quote along the lines of the post title, but I've never been able to find it.

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