Interview with author Margaret Atwood

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Read an excerpt from Moral Disorder.

CL: Are you working on anything new right now?
MA: Yes, I am.

CL: More fiction?
MA: I'm not telling. I never tell.

CL: In terms of your career -- when you started out, Canadian literature was in a very different phase than it is now. So, say you'd reached your writing time now, as opposed to when you did, how do you think your career would have been different?
MA: How is it for young people now? How it is for young people now is, first of all, there's a lot more of them who are writers. So there's more competition within their own group. Second, there are a lot more outlets available -- there's a lot more publishers. But third, those publishers are quite picky about what they're going to publish, because the whole scenario has changed, and also it's changing very quickly right now. There's a paradigm shift going on at this very moment, which is being propelled by so many things going online. So book publishers are going to have to rethink how they're doing business and that, of course, is going to change the conditions for young writers. And we don't know how that's all going to turn out. It's in a state of great flux at the moment, having been stable for a number of years -- all the cards have been thrown up into the air. And we don't know how that's all going to settle down.

CL: So in terms of your own career, do you think you would have had a harder time or an easier time now?
MA: You know, that's impossible to say. You really can't -- if I were a younger person, I would be a different person. Something I always do for characters in my books is make them a time chart. And that time chart shows not only their own birthday -- day, month and year -- but what else happened in those following years. So if my character was born in, say, 1950, they're six when Elvis Presley makes his appearance, they're 16 in the middle of the '60s, and therefore they're 18 right about the time the flower children hit, so they probably grow their hair long and smoke dope -- a novel thing to have done at that time -- and then they're 26 in the mid-'70s, so it goes like that. So you are going to be different depending on what age you live in, because the forces being brought to bear on you and the opportunities open to you are going to be different.

CL: You do that for all your characters?
MA: I do that for all of my characters. It also shows how old they are in relation to one another.

CL: That brings me to another question. When you're working on a project, when you're starting it out, do you start all the plans right away, work all this stuff out, or do you start writing and it evolves from there?
MA: No, I start writing and it evolves from there, but one of the things I get to pretty early on is how old is this person. Because that's going to influence how they're looking at life, what's happened to them so far, what their parents are like, all of those things.

CL: Do you think you do that more than other writers?
MA: No, I think they all do it. Unless they're having, you know, an adventure story in twinkletoe land that has no relation to the world we actually live in.

CL: There's one more thing I wanted to ask about Moral Disorder. I guess it was about two years ago when you were planning the book. Was there anything that prompted working on this particular project right now?
MA: No, you just get to a point where it's time to write something that you've been thinking about writing for a while. But I always have a list of about five things like that.

CL: Too many ideas and not enough time?
MA: That's the idea.

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