I Wonder What on Earth Possessed Me

Scene: How did the protagonist of your new book, Nancy Culpepper, materialize in your mind?

Mason: In about 1980 I wrote some notes in a notebook about my grandmother’s photographs, along with the name NANCY CULPEPPER.

Scene: You’ve remarked elsewhere that she, among all your characters, is the one with the sensibility you feel closest to.

Mason: She began as someone like me, torn between two worlds. She quickly developed into someone whose adult life was quite different from mine. She’s married to a photographer and has a son. But the emotional split between her past and the world she lives in as an adult is similar to my own.

Scene: Does your fiction usually begin in your mind with an image or a scene or a character trait or a voice, or in some other way?

Mason: Usually for a short story there is something quite small—an image, a sound.

Scene: Do you begin to follow a character and then find her story, or does a setting or situation intrigue you first, and then you discover the characters in it?

Mason: The novel In Country began, improbably, with an image of two teenagers selling flowers to motorists. That image did not survive, but it led me to intriguing characters and a mysterious situation that I had to discover. I didn’t know it was going to be about Vietnam. But for Feather Crowns, I was inspired by a real story of a woman who had quintuplets, so the whole story was waiting for me to flesh out.

Scene: Does a story usually work out once you find characters lurking in your brain long enough that you decide to follow them and see where they go?

Mason: Ordinarily, I don’t have any characters lurking in my brain. Those characters in In Country just bloomed into being very early.

Scene: Do you sometimes follow characters—such as those two teenagers selling flowers—for a few pages but find that their lives remain opaque to you?

Mason: Often I don’t know who the characters are until I build them out of details, action and so forth. For example, the quintuplets in Feather Crowns—five babies that people couldn’t tell apart. I certainly couldn’t tell them apart, but I knew their mother would be able to identify each one in a lineup. So I had to find the differentiations between these five nearly identical beings, so they could become real.

Scene: So if you commit to them, they deliver?

Mason: I didn’t feel much about those babies until after I had made them come to life as individuals. And then they broke my heart.

Scene: You wrote a dissertation on Nabokov’s Ada. Your method of creating a character piece by piece reminds me of Nabokov’s method of composing all over the canvas at once on those famous oversize index cards.

Mason: I don’t use index cards, but Nabokov’s kaleidoscopic method of imagining the surfaces is something I identify with. I don’t have a logical mind that can seize a linear narrative. To me, writing is like working a giant jigsaw puzzle, with the pieces mixed up and facing downward. Little by little I discover how they’re put together.

Scene: Do you have an idea of what’s next for you? Or have you already written new work that has yet to be published?

Mason: I don’t have anything new, but I’m working on a novel. I’m in the beginning stages. Usually I flounder around for a year, getting distracted by research (far more than necessary), and procrastinating. This is a miserable and scary process, and I wonder what on earth possessed me. But I recognize this stage and have grown more patient with it. Sooner or later, things start to click and then I get more focused. By the end, I don’t want to quit.