Tidhar 写作《中央车站》

在《芝加哥书评》对 Lavie Tidhar 的访谈中，Tidhar 提到了他是如何写作《中央车站》的：

I worked on it, on and off, for about 6 years! It was my crazy little side project, basically. I’m still amazed it got published! It’s interesting working on it in chunks, because you’re plotting individual stories and then fitting them into the overall narrative — but I wasn’t going for plot much with this, I was taking a very different tack to my more commercial novels, and just exploring people, relationships. I was very much exploring as I went along. And it’s set in a wider universe I’ve been writing about, on and off, for over a decade, so it was easy to fit in a lot of material that, if you follow the thread, will lead to another story entirely.

[…]

Central Station was always meant to be a single creation, but I was always fascinated by the old science fiction novels that were done as mosaics, that were sold as stories first — mostly it’s a way of getting a bit more money, really! But it’s quite a challenge to do, as I found out. What really happened was that, when I was finished with the sequence, it didn’t quite work, and I couldn’t quite pinpoint why. It took Tachyon’s support, and great editorial feedback, to help me find it, which I was incredibly grateful for — as I was getting pretty frustrated at that point! It was mostly technical — reordering the stories, I think we dropped one, cut one in half, and then smoothed the transitions, removed redundancies… it really was just normal drafting work, you know. 95% of it is the same. It was actually very soothing, once I knew what I had to do!

注意其中提到的编辑工作。在拼贴式的小说创作中，主题的发掘和线索的组织并不总是直截了当的，编辑有时候需要和作者一起发现这些零散的素材的真正价值。