Writing
When Almond began writing the novel, he felt that Erin should be the main character because she was the strongest and because he wanted to write from the point of view of a girl this time. Almond referred to the novel's opening line of,"My name is Erin Law" as a "bit of an homage" to the opening line of Moby Dick, "Call me Ishmael." The abandoned building in the novel was inspired by a real building located on a "sludgy river gully" near the Tyne, which has been turned into Seven Stories, an attraction that promotes literature.
Read more about this topic: Heaven Eyes
Famous quotes containing the word writing:
“No author, without a trial, can conceive of the difficulty of writing a romance about a country where there is no shadow, no antiquity, no mystery, no picturesque and gloomy wrong, nor anything but a commonplace prosperity, in broad and simple daylight, as is happily the case with my dear native land.”
—Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864)
“I am carrying out my plan, so long formulated, of keeping a journal. What I most keenly wish is not to forget that I am writing for myself alone. Thus I shall always tell the truth, I hope, and thus I shall improve myself. These pages will reproach me for my changes of mind.”
—Eugène Delacroix (1798–1863)
“The human head is bigger than the globe. It conceives itself as containing more. It can think and rethink itself and ourselves from any desired point outside the gravitational pull of the earth. It starts by writing one thing and later reads itself as something else. The human head is monstrous.”
—Günther Grass (b. 1927)