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Ask the Author: James McBride

“Ask me a question.” James McBride

Answered Questions (6)

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What was it like to collaborate with Spike Lee on Miracle at St Anna?
James McBride It was great. Spike is a very hard working guy. First on the set, last to leave, that type of working man. Helped me learn screenwriting technique, and seen every movie that you can imagine. A deeply talented director.
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How does your background in music affect your current writing?
James McBride Music teaches you to fail. Failure teaches success. Music teaches you structure, and where you must play the ink on the page, and where you can solo and burst into your own song. Music, the theory of it, the analytical part of it, helps a lot.
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I've heard that you wrote The Color of Water while pretty much always on the road. What was it like to write under those constraints?
James McBride I can write anywhere. If the story is in you, it’ll come out wherever you are. Writing is something that you cannot NOT do, if it’s in your soul.
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How much reading do you do daily for pleasure? How much is reading important to a writer?
James McBride I don’t do any reading for pleasure any more, other than comic books. I’m into the new Spider Man, Miles Morales. Every writer should read a lot. I read constantly. I’m reading Taylor Branch’s magnificent works on the civil rights movement, “Parting The Waters.” It’s in three volumes. It’s up there with “The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich,” Richard Kramer’s “What It Takes,” and all the Robert Caro books.
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How much like the real Frederick Douglass is the Frederick Douglass in The Good Lord Bird?
James McBride He was like Douglass only in the sense that Douglass did have a black wife and a white mistress, and they were in the same house for a time. The white mistress died in sad circumstances. I believe she returned to Germany and committed suicide there.
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How did you and your siblings go from being beaten as a child to such a loving an appreciative relationship with your mother? This felt like a missing piece in The Color of Water. I understand that your mother too was beaten. But I'm assuming that you and your siblings did not continue the legacy. Can you fill in the missing piece?
James McBride There is no missing piece. It wasn’t a book about “beatings” It was a book about a mother’s love. We got spanked. Sometimes that works, sometimes that doesn’t. Usually, it’s not necessary y. But if a mother loves her children, and knows how to mother them, and she believes in spankings, why not? Some of the language that is used with regard to parenting is fraught with nonsense and political implications that are misleading and used wrongly. I’m glad she spanked me. I deserved em all.
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