You are a human animal.

You are a very special breed, or you are the only animal.

Who can think, who can reason, who can read.

Hi, this is Michael Silverblad, and welcome to Bookworm.

Today my guest is Margaret

Atwood, the author most recently of The Robber Bride and of many other novels and books of

short stories, among them Lady Oracle and The Handmaiden's Tale and Cat's Eye, and I'm very happy to

have you here today. I wanted to talk about the Robert Bride and my impression as well of other of your books,

that they start out as improvisations.

By the end of Robert Bride, it feels very carefully structured,

but the books always seem to read in a very

free-floating way. How do you start a novel?

Well, I certainly don't plan them out or make a big set of graphs. Let's put it that way.

I once thought that I was too improvisational and that I should

do more planning ahead of time. And I planned a novel out on filing cards. And there were

eight characters in it and five parts to the novel. And each one of the eight characters was going

to have one part in each of the five parts. You can see that adds up to 40.

So I had 40 filing cards and it just didn't work for me. I think I have to step in to the novel

before I know where it's going and part of the fun or interest or adventure

or whatever you want to call it of writing the book

is finding out who these people are

and what they're doing and where they're going.

...