The Ten Year Affair began life as a short story. It can be tricky to expand a narrative from a few pages to a few hundred pages, and you pull it off here. Can you talk about your process in expanding the story? How much of the narrative did you have to change and were there any tools (e.g., outlining) that helped you expand?
The story is about thirteen pages long, so there was a lot to do. The first thing I tried was keeping the story’s same beats and just filling it out a lot, inventing more, letting scenes go on longer. No dice. This did not work. A playful thing about the short story, the joke at the heart of it, is that the two main characters do not sleep together. At thirteen pages, that’s fine. At 300 pages it’s impossible. My agent in particular was like, “There must be sex in this novel. Please put sex in this novel!”
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