And when we're telling the story of another person, just how many assumptions and wrong guesses and our own stuff has been projected into that.' 'Part of the function of Hadley in the book became to create that lens on how much is lost of a person. In order to portray Marian in the film, Hadley had to learn about her past, but there's no way she can know everything. And I also thought, particularly for Marian and Jamie, that being orphaned, they start their lives with a sense that there's something just over the horizon that they're looking for, something that can't quite be found.' And, at least in fiction, they're creating an identity kind of whole cloth.

'You have someone who's not coming out of a traditional family unit. Three of the main characters are orphans: Marian, her brother Jamie, and Hadley. I was waiting for edits on my second book, and I thought I should write a novel about an aviatrix.' 'In 2012, I saw a statue of a female pilot named Jean Batten at the Auckland Airport, and I just had a project die on me. The idea for this novel came from an accidental discovery. There's a fascinating echo between the two characters. A second plot thread in the novel involves an actress named Hadley Baxter, who is going to play Marian Graves in a movie. The novel is about Marian Graves, who gets hooked on flying when she sees some early barnstormers. It was supposed to be about the legacy of a disappeared aviatrix I didn't plan for it to have this close granularity of her sort of entire life. And I started writing under several false apprehensions, like I thought I would just write it in a year or two, I thought it would be a normal length book, like my other books. 'I always start writing without any sort of plan I don't plot in advance. Great Circle is a long, slow adventure novel, around 600 pages long. 'It might be odd to thank an inanimate entity, but I could not have surmounted the organizational challenges of this novel without the writing application Scrivener.' In the acknowledgments to Great Circle, Maggie cited Scrivener: Her first novel won the Dylan Thomas prize, and Great Circle is shortlisted for the 2021 Booker Prize. Maggie Shipstead is the author of three novels, Seating Arrangements, Astonish Me, and Great Circle. And check out past episodes of Write Now with Scrivener. Leave a rating or review, and tell your friends.

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The great circle book