Hannah Pittard

Hannah Pittard's new novel is Listen to Me.

From her Q&A with Deborah Kalb:

Q: Your new novel, Listen to Me, takes place over the course of 24 hours. Were there particular challenges involved in writing a novel that takes place over a condensed time frame?

A: I wouldn’t call them challenges so much as choices. When you’re working with a deliberately distilled moment in time, the decision between what should be scene and what should be summary becomes an incredibly important one. I wanted this to be a tight, fast novel in which every word and every moment mattered.

Q: You write that the inspiration for the book came from a road trip you and your husband took. What made you decide to write a novel based on that trip, and what role did the ongoing storm play for you?

A: I started the book while waiting for edits on my second novel. It was a way for me to keep my mind occupied so I couldn’t obsess over the project, which at the time was out of my control.

The night we drove through a storm, we stayed at a hotel without power. I didn’t sleep, if at all. In the morning I thought, This would be a pretty good set of circumstances for a novel… My bad luck (storm, hotel without power) turned out to be...[read on]

Visit Hannah Pittard's website.

--Marshal Zeringue