{"id":10630,"date":"2023-09-26T07:00:00","date_gmt":"2023-09-26T11:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=10630"},"modified":"2023-09-25T18:24:35","modified_gmt":"2023-09-25T22:24:35","slug":"what-makes-a-fiction-writer-jo-nesbo","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=10630","title":{"rendered":"What Makes a Fiction Writer? Jo Nesb\u00f8"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Norwegian crime writer Jo Nesb\u00f8 recently gave The Guardian<\/em><\/a> a rundown of the books he counts among his greatest influences. His dad grew up in New York, so the household included a wealth of books by America authors, which exposed him to early favorites Tom Sawyer <\/em>and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn <\/em>\u2013\u201cfood for the imagination for a kid like me.\u201d With Tom Sawyer<\/em>, he found his first murder mystery.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

(Note that Huckleberry Finn<\/em> is number 33 on the American Library Association\u2019s list<\/a> of books most frequently challenged in libraries and schools from 2010-2019.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As a teenager, Nesb\u00f8\u2019s perception about what literature can and should deal with evolved, in part due to reading Jean Genet\u2019s classic, The Thief\u2019s Journal<\/em>. He says he knew he wanted to be a writer after reading some gritty works\u2014On the Road<\/em> by Jack Kerouac and Ham on Rye<\/em> by Charles Bukowski\u2014which may have inspired some of the noir strains in Nesb\u00f8\u2019s own writing, especially the Detective Harry Hole series (the only works of his I\u2019ve read).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What a big debt most successful writers owe their early inluencers! Like me, you may be surprised when self-proclaimed authors say that they \u201cdon\u2019t read,\u201d or that they don\u2019t read in the genre they want to write in. As a friend has said, \u201creading is like breathing in; writing is like breathing out.\u201d Writing requires reading. Nesb\u00f8 endorses this notion, even saying that \u201cwriting is a result<\/em> of reading, like making music is a result of listening to music.\u201d He calls it a social reflex, the way people tell stories around the dinner table, or the campfire, or in the foxhole. Storytelling was a strong tradition<\/a> in the southern United States, which could be why so many great storytellers have southern roots.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Now that Nesb\u00f8 is older and an acclaimed writer himself, some authors no longer hold appeal (Hemingway), though he\u2019s still making discoveries (Joseph Roth\u2019s The Radetzky March<\/em>) and has returned to some authors with new appreciation\u2014he cites his fellow Norwegian Henrik Ibsen, (whose play, An Enemy of the People<\/em>, is one of my favorites). Currently, he\u2019s reading Jonathan Haidt\u2019s The Righteous Mind<\/em>, which would seem to be feeding the same impulse that made him think about what literature should deal with. It will be interesting to see if some of Haidt\u2019s ideas about how people make moral judgments find their way into Nesb\u00f8\u2019s fiction.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Nesb\u00f8 is the popular author of bestselling crime thrillers like The Snowman<\/a><\/em> and The Son<\/a><\/em>, has a new horror novel out later this week, The Night House<\/a><\/em>, available for pre-order. Tagline: When the voices call, don\u2019t answer<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Image: By Elena Torre – Flickr: Jo Nesbo, CC BY-SA 2.0, https:\/\/commons.wikimedia.org\/w\/index.php?curid=19747762<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Norwegian crime writer Jo Nesb\u00f8 recently gave The Guardian a rundown of the books he counts among his greatest influences. His dad grew up in New York, so the household included a wealth of books by America authors, which exposed … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"Best-selling crime writer Jo Nesb\u00f8 talks about the books that influenced him. Wouldn't Mark Twain be surprised!","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[62,1288,126,60,29],"tags":[2122],"class_list":["post-10630","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-authors","category-culture","category-reading-2","category-storytelling","category-writing","tag-jo-nesbo-2"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2NkiT-2Ls","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10630","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10630"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10630\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10632,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10630\/revisions\/10632"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10630"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10630"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10630"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}