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Khaled Hosseini Discusses The Kite Runner
From: www.writerswrite.com

" The Associated Press talks with Khaled Hosseini about his inspiration for his bestselling novel, The Kite Runner. Hosseini, an physician who was born in Afghanistan, says that he first wrote a short story about two Afghan boys who enjoyed flying kites. He wrote the original short story six years ago, all in one 12-hour stretch. He didn't pick up the manuscript again until two years later when his father-in-law read the story and told him it should be longer.

"I revisited the short story and decided that maybe there was a book in it," Hosseini recalls, leaning against the thick cushions of his living room sofa. "It really started off very small."

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"That it would reach this kind of readership is pretty stunning," says Hosseini, wearing a striped button-down shirt and white pants. "It's still pretty weird."

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Hosseini, 40, is surprisingly modest for a first-time novelist who has enjoyed such phenomenal success. He's still getting used to his newfound fame, and says he never intended to be a writer. "I always loved writing, but I really just did it for myself because I enjoyed the act of writing and creating stories," says Hosseini, speaking English with only a slight accent. "I never wrote with the aim of publishing. ... Now I find myself doing it for a living, at least for the time being." Hosseini and his wife, a Silicon Valley attorney who is also of Afghan descent, speak to their children in both Farsi and English and maintain close ties to the San Francisco Bay area's Afghan community.

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Hosseini comes from a large, prominent family in Kabul. His father was a diplomat and his mother was a teacher. He's the oldest of five children raised in a secular household. And while there's no single childhood event that haunts him, Hosseini says he always felt guilty about his privilege. "I was raised in an affluent life in a very poor country, and you always have that sense of guilt about your own good fortune," he says.

Michael Piller, "Star Trek" veteran and co-creator/executive producer of USA Network's hit series The Dead Zone, died early Tuesday at his Los Angeles home after a long battle with cancer. He was 57.

Before co-creating The Dead Zone with his son Shawn, Piller was head writer on Star Trek: The Next Generation," leading the show to a best drama Emmy nomination in 1994, the first for a syndicated series. He went on to co-create the following two "Trek" installments, Deep Space Nine and Voyager. Both series ran for seven seasons.

In 1998, Piller wrote and co-produced Star Trek: Insurrection, the ninth installment in Paramount Pictures' successful Star Trek feature franchise. Piller began his career in broadcasting, working for TV stations in Charlotte, N.C., and Chicago.

But being the toast of Tinseltown was not all it was cracked up to be, as the burly 43-year-old told the BBC News website during a recent visit to London Film Festival.

"People would act like Joe Eszterhas and I were duking it out [battling] for this king-of-the-hill cash prize," he said. "I was getting attention for all the wrong reasons, and it left a very bad taste in my mouth. It didn't feel like fun anymore. And when it stops being fun, it's time to take a step back." And that is what Black did by taking a self-imposed, eight-year hiatus from the movie industry. "I went out of my way to get out of the spotlight and find a place where I was a little more invisible."

Hollywood, though, can be a fickle beast, as he discovered when he tried to find backing for his new film, the comedy thriller Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang. To his horror, he realised his name did not carry the same cachet that it used to. "It was very humbling," he explained. "I was used to getting scripts read the same day I turned them in. "Now weeks would go by and people still hadn't got round to reading it."

It did not help that Black was determined to direct the film himself, or that the script - a film noir pastiche starring Robert Downey Jr as a reluctant gumshoe - featured a gay character (played by Val Kilmer) in a leading role. "Everyone was very reluctant," he told the BBC News website. "I'll go further: everyone hated it. "I was getting doors slammed in my face all across town."

The biennial Neustadt Prize is the only international literary award from the United States for which poets, playwrights and novelists are given equal consideration. It is widely considered the most prestigious international prize after the Nobel Prize in Literature and is often called the "American Nobel." Twenty-five Neustadt laureates, candidates or jurors in the past 37 years have been awarded Nobel Prizes following their involvement with the Neustadt Prize.

Alegria was born in Esteli, Nicaragua, but from early childhood lived in the Santa Anaregion of western El Salvador. She is the 19th recipient of the Neustadt Prize and the third woman to win. Alegria's poetry and fiction has been translated into more than 14 languages, and she has received numerous awards in Europe, Latin America and the United States.

Didion never writes from outlines. She knew the book would end a year after her husband's death. She sensed that an especially intense crisis in her daughter's illness would form a "movement" that should fall a certain distance into the narrative. Otherwise she didn't plan. She just wrote.

Her husband, John Gregory Dunne, was a writer as well. Over the years, he had drilled into her the need to include a so-called billboard section: a short passage, early on, that tells readers what you're writing about. At the beginning of Didion's career, she had sometimes neglected to do this. On that first writing day, when she got to the place where the billboard should fall, she typed one in.

This was her effort, she explained, to make sense of the disorienting months after her husband died and their daughter fell ill, a period "that cut loose any fixed idea I had ever had about death, about illness, about probability and luck, about good fortune and bad, about marriage and children and memory, about grief, about the ways in which people do and do not deal with the fact that life ends, about the shallowness of sanity, about life itself." It was a classic billboard, a billboard to make John proud....