Books Begin from the Simplest Things

 

E.L. Doctorow wrote books that could be described as many things, but seldom as simple. Yet he was the first to admit that the ideas for his novels could often be seeded from the simplest of things.

“An image, sound, idea,” he elaborated when I met him at a book festival years ago. “You explore it and see where it goes. It’s not a rational thing, to write a book.”

He wrote City of God, for example, when he saw the image of a cross on the top of a synagogue.

“A novel, among other things, is a mixture of opinions.” Doctorow is an expert at mixing those opinions in an interesting way

Check out Doctorow’s City of God on Goodreads here.