Short fiction differ from your approach to writing a novel as large as this

I spent the next year writing a second and third draft that incorporated what I was still learning (I was working with a twenty-seven box archive at Columbia, and coming across new books all the time), and pushed deeper into the characters’ inner experience. My editor kindly reassured me that the heart of the book was sound. I showed pages to my editor far earlier than with my last two books all I had at the time was a long, shaggy, oddly proportioned first draft. That working-out was necessary, but no one else really needed to read it.Īs the novel developed, the segments (or, OK, chapters) not only shortened, they got denser with fact and, one hopes, with feeling. But I suspect it also had to do with my habit of working out ideas on the page: my own understanding of the novel’s moral complexities, the characters’ feelings about one another, and the difficulties posed by the novel’s sociopolitical context (occupied France in 1940). This phenomenon probably had something to do with research-the book accreted pages as I learned more about my subject, then had to be cut back as the narrative became more focused. Then, to keep moving forward, it had to get shorter. You’ve been working on your new novel, The Flight Portfolio, for many years how has it changed shape over the course of drafting?Įarthworm-wise. Orringer teaches fiction at Brooklyn College.

She shared thoughts about her research, writing process, and balancing reading and writing shorter work during the ten-year process of completing a five-hundred page novel. I was fortunate enough to have the chance to interview her this spring, about her new novel, The Flight Portfolio. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband and children, and is at work on a novel set in New Orleans. She is the winner of the Paris Review’s Plimpton Prize and has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Cullman Center at the New York Public Library, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, the MacDowell Colony, and Yaddo. Her stories have appeared in numerous anthologies, including The Granta Book of the American Short Story and The Scribner Anthology of American Short Fiction. Knopf, and her books have been translated into twenty languages. All her work has been published by Alfred A. Her new novel, The Flight Portfolio, tells the story of Varian Fry, the New York journalist who went to Marseille in 1940 to save writers and artists blacklisted by the Gestapo. Julie Orringer is the author of two award-winning books: The Invisible Bridge, a New York Times bestselling novel, and How to Breathe Underwater, a collection of stories.

Julie orringer the flight portfolio