Author Ann Patchett on writing amid chaos

In the latest influential episode, American writer Anne Patchett shares how seeing the kindness around her affects the way she approaches her character.

The world needs a “life-changing book,” Anne Patchett once wrote in an essay New York Times. She did not mention her work, but admirers of the bestselling US author claim this is what she accomplished and a highly acclaimed novel, including Bel Cant.

Patchett cites John Updike and Roxane Gay As Impact She dispels praise for her deep work. Looking back at her book, she says it took her years to feel like a successful writer, even when it included the New York Times award-winning 2001 novel Bel Canto. Best Books on the 21st Century List.

“I didn’t think you could make art and succeed,” she told BBC’s Katty Kay. They sit in a book by Parnassus, a bookstore patchet that opened in Nashville, Tennessee in 2011. Her 1992 novel “The Patron Saint of the Liars and Memoirs of 2013” hybrid, this is a happy marriage story. “[It] It never happened to me. ”

While some may see the author opening the bookstore as self-service, Patchet explains that she approached it like a civic duty. She didn’t want to live in a city without it. She co-founded her after seeing the local bookstore close.

“I really fell backwards, not wanting to open a bookstore,” she says. “It was great. It was a great joy.”

Patchett has become prominent in the fiction world, creating a story that brings together unexpected situations and even unexpected characters. For example, consider the patron saint of the liars, or the home of an unmarried mother in a mysterious state of 2011, deep in the Amazon rainforest. She describes the book’s scenario as “people in confinement,” but the story spans everything from the events of a retreat in meditation to hostage situations and to her own memoirs.

“The setting is fun,” she talks about the commonality, but she quickly points out that deep things are always going on. Readers were taken to the South American jungle, Los Angeles and Chicago city of Alpine Peaks, but Patchet says first and foremost, those far-flung locations, that fans want to connect. “The setting is frosting, but it’s always a relationship.”

Patchett said he resisted the siren songs on social media before watching TV.

“I’m very interested in protecting my brain, and I’m not just interrupted,” she tells Kay. She uses a flip phone, but she doesn’t remember her number and avoids both smartphones and social media. “I’ve never texted it. It really seems like a bad idea. I don’t want people to keep me from taking me with me all the time.”

She may not be involved, but she knows the digital world – and it will forth in her work. When Kay asks how to capture reader attention when all of his readers have a feed to scroll, Patchett doesn’t consider this to be a problem.

“There’s always someone you want to read,” she says. “There is no truth about people’s existence, how they get entertainment, how they get education.”

Looking back at the characters in her book, Patchet explains that she is more attracted to kindness than anything else. When she sees everything going on around her, she doesn’t just look at confusion and destiny.

“In my novels, there is probably more kindness than you see in other books, but less kindness than you see in your everyday life,” she says.

When her seventh novel, Commonwealth, was published in 2016, she spoke to fellow author Zadie Smith.

“‘Autobiographical fiction isn’t what happened to us. It’s something we fear that will happen. It’s something we are obsessed with, thoughts and worried,” Packett says. “What am I afraid of at that moment, who am I afraid of being there? What do I always think?”

Taking these questions head on, Patchett was able to create a character that resonated with his readers. She says her fans brought a hardcover copy of her first edition of Belcant at the festival (she will soon remind everyone every (The hardcover for Bel Canto is the first edition), and tell her that she was able to make something very special in every book.

As always, she disregards such admiration. “I do it because I love doing it. I don’t feel any pressure,” she says. “If I never wrote a book again, the world will continue to work.”

Katty Kay will air on Friday at 21:30 ET on the BBC News channel.