Get to Know Tom Perrotta

The following quote comes from a 20 questions segment from Post Road Magazine. I agree with his views on the writing workshop:

There’s a lot you can learn from workshops—how to edit other people’s work, how to accept criticism, how to gain some distance on your work. It’s great to have an audience when you’re starting out, and you probably won’t ever get a more attentive group of readers than your workshop colleagues. Some of the best friends I've had are people I've met in the hothouse of fiction workshops. But like anything else, workshops become frustrating and repetitive after a while; there comes a point when you’re able to internalize the voice of your colleagues, and anticipate their reactions in advance. At that point, you're better off on your own.

Here's what he has to say about the screen adaptation of Election (from an interview at Zulkey):

Were you pleased with the screen adaptation of Election? Do you think it was faithful enough to the book?

I loved the movie version of Election-it was one of the funniest and most memorable American movies of the past twenty years. It was broadly faithful to the plot of the book, with the exception of the ending, which had to be rewritten and reshot when the original ending fell a bit flat on screen. But what really makes the movie terrific isn't that it's particularly faithful to my book. It's that the director, Alexander Payne (who also wrote the script, along with Jim Taylor) was able to bring his own inimitable sensibility-which is much more satiric and hard-edged than my own-to the material, and transform it in unexpected ways. That was the really exciting part of the translation from one medium to another-watching another artist breathe new life into the work.

Finally, here is what he has to say when asked about the future of American literature (from an interview with Arriviste Press):


What is the future of American literature? How realistic is it to expect people to digest full-length novels or collections in the face of other entertainment distractions? How do we keep from losing our "marketplace"? How do we get people to read instead of fire up the PlayStation?

TP: It's funny that you ask that question just now. Sometimes it seems like we're in a moment of immense cultural change when lots of traditional forms are being displaced -- the sitcom by reality TV, quality narrative films by high-concept blockbusters, the novel by the video game or whatever. But the new Harry Potter came out last week, and kids all over the country were lining up to buy it. So even the PlayStation generation knows the particular pleasure of disappearing inside a good book for a while, and living through characters on the page. For some small percentage of those kids, reading novels might even become a habit, or even a passion, the way it is for some small percentage of the adult population now.