Which element sparked this book for you? From there, how did you go about developing and adding its additional layers? So teaching craft has helped me become a better writer, and it continues to help me every day.ĮA: Readers will be struck by the breadth and depth of Morningside Heights. I had to teach myself to become more intuitive. There are writers who are more naturally intuitive than I am. But when I graduated from college, I worked for a magazine where I was the first reader of fiction manuscripts, and I saw how bad most of them were, and I thought if other people were willing to try and risk failure, I should be willing to try and risk failure, too. I mean, I always wanted to be a novelist, but it seemed as likely as my being a ballerina.

JH: In a lot of ways, I was a critic before I was novelist. There’s a lot to be said for dramatic irony, but sometimes there can be too much dramatic irony for a novel’s own good.ĮA: What excites you most about the craft of writing? How has your approach to teaching shifted over the years? The reader knew pretty early on that Spence had dementia, and was just waiting for Pru to catch up, and that waiting period wasn’t very interesting. For 200 pages, Pru refused to recognize what was staring her in the face, which made her seem more obtuse than she was and drained some of the tension from the novel. As one example, I don’t generally like “big-reveal” novels, but in an early draft of Morningside Heights I didn’t listen to my own advice and it took me too long to get to the Alzheimer’s diagnosis. Joshua Henkin: I’m not a big believer in rules, though I do think there are some general principles worth thinking about.

Morningside heights by joshua henkin