Researching Mundanity: The Details in Contemporary Fiction
I wrote my first novel about a world I’d been living in forever: the large public school. As a teacher for nearly 20 years, I was intimately familiar with the settings, the procedures, the schedules, the conflicts, and the characters that typically populate an illustrious institution of learning. In fact, at one stage in my revision, I was asked to make things less realistic. “What’s with all the armpits and…
