Learning to be an architect of ideas.

I have long been addicted to The New York Times Book Review. It is not that I am a writer groupie as much as I find it fascinating to read about how a book came about.

Writing, to my mind, is about architecting a narrative from raw material, be it fiction or nonfiction. Literary criticism and interviews with authors help me to understand how the idea of a story was used to create blueprints, how those blueprints made it possible to construct a scaffold, and how the scaffold supported the words that brought the story to life. Interviews have been a significant source of insight and inspiration for my work in the Pharma of the Future™ project.

Recently, the new editor of The Paris Review, Lorin Stein, decided to make the entire run of The Paris Review’s interview series available online. According to Dwight Garner in The New York Times, these interviews were previously almost impossible to find in electronic form, and now they are available, free for the browsing, at https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews.

Garner says, “The interviews in The Paris Review . . . have long set the standard, for better and occasionally worse, for what well-brewed conversation should sound like on the page.”

One of the more recent interviews is with Ray Bradbury, who is now 90 years old. Read his telling of how he met Mr. Electrico, the basis for a character in Something Wicked This Way Comes. It’s just a beautiful piece.

If that knocked your socks off, take a look at our next cool topic: Impressions of Monet. And if you want to peruse all of the previous sock-knocking blog entries, visit the Knocked My Socks Off archive. (links to another blog site)