DAVID BERGEN

A mentor, a 'teacher,' is like an editor. I absolutely value my editor, who is my teacher.

That's the novelist's job: to peel back the layers and look underneath.

Books in general are great, but I'm a fiction lover, and I will continue to do it.

In 1970, at the age of 14, I entered a short story contest offering a grand prize of one dollar. I won. This was my first foray into writing fiction. I loved reading and thought that it shouldn't be so hard to write a story.

I always have a book that I use that somehow inspires my novels.

I was a big reader of Zane Grey as a young boy, and so horses and the West figured large in my imagination.

The story wrote quickly. I called it 'Where You're From,' and I sent it out, as I had numerous other stories over the years. Except this time I got a letter back saying that it would be published. Someone out there had liked the story. I was thirty-one years old.

As a writer, I'm always aware of the fact that there are so many books out there.

For me, when I 'discover' a story, there is a feeling of buoyancy and clarity, perhaps similar to early morning out on a prairie highway, when darkness lifts and reveals the outline of farmhouses and copses of trees in the distance.

One day, at my office, I wrote down some names and dates and notes, and I wrote a title, 'The Age of Despair,' and then some other 'Ages' - Innocence, God, Reason, Hope - and I wrote this as well: 'Woman, born in 1930, lives till the age of 80 or so, suffers depression, marries a car dealer, has children who grow up to confuse her.'

I gave up writing for seven years (very biblical) and picked it up again, still clueless and still seeking the exotic, when I was twenty-one.

Failure is essential. Trial and error is necessary.

Though I loved books as a young boy, I loved sports even more. I wanted to be a quarterback in the CFL.

Every year, the Giller jury is different. You write the best book you can and throw it out there.

The first accepted piece of writing is the most exciting. No other publishing experience matches it. Perhaps jaundice sets in, or expectations are raised, or one starts to think that one is better than is the truth.

I think a construction project for me is like writing a novel. I can't do the project unless I can envision sort of the whole structure and see what the end result might be.

You are only as good as your last book, and so there has to be a book.

In my brief writing life, it means I am still lucky that I have at least one more novel to complete. I do not expect that a story will arrive just because it is time to write another novel. It doesn't happen that way.

As a writer, you write the book, you give it to your editor, it's copy edited, it's published, it's thrown out there, and then there's a response.

I may not have written the stories that I've written if I hadn't ended up in Niverville. I don't know; I don't know. How can you know?

Invite characters of surprising and moral character, or at least those who grapple with what is right or those who make decisions that shock.

I like characters who are contradictory.

The IMPAC is a terribly important award.

I tend to push whatever is looking over my shoulder away when I am writing. It's once the box of books arrive that I say I'm going to be pilloried for this or that. But then you realize it's done, and there is nothing I can do. I'm proud of the book.

When I get moved to write a story, I don't question the story. I dive right in, and I try to ignore the voices that are chattering away at me: 'You can't do that', 'You shouldn't do that'. I just sort of leap and take a chance and go for it.