Douglas Westerbeke Biography, Books, and Similar Authors

Interview

Douglas Westerbeke discusses his debut novel, A Short Walk Through a Wide World.

How did you come up with the general concept of A Short Walk Through a Wide World? Did you have a method for keeping track of all the different plotlines?

A Short Walk Through a Wide World actually began as a short story I was thinking of one day, about an old lady who goes to her doctor for some mild ailment. Her doctor tells her to travel somewhere warm and dry (this is the 1880s when that's what people did) but all she hears is travel. So she ends up wandering the world trying to evade whatever it is she's afraid of, getting into more trouble than it's worth. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized I had the makings of a much bigger adventure, so the old lady became young, was struck with a really God-awful sickness, and I went about creating a lifetime of adventures for her.

The story was a broken narrative right from the start. I knew I wouldn't be able to fit in all the ideas I wanted to with a linear narrative. I knew I wanted to begin in that marketplace with a near-death scene. From there it was easy to imagine it as a story she was telling to others along the way. Even my preliminary one-page outline, which is how I always start a story, jumped around everywhere. If fact, it was even crazier, with stories ...