“I have an almost religious belief that nonfiction is built from careful observation, which reveals that almost anything—from the tree outside the window, to a horrible sandwich, to a devastating life event—has some kind of meaningful system, or structure, to it. Sometimes that structure is defined by entropy, or resembles a Greek play, or is purely Freudian in nature.
I feel like I have remarkable things happening to me all of the time, probably because I’m always looking at everything so carefully and analyzing its structure. When I’m really stuck, or muddled because I’ve confused myself, I turn to something that has a really obvious banal architecture, like long-running TV shows. Buffy the Vampire Slayer works very well, so does Alias.”
—Minna Proctor, author of Do You Hear What I Hear (Viking, 2005)