The name of the rose author

Sound familiar? Oh, and it finishes up with an unintentional writing prompt: the only mystery plot that remains unwritten is the book where the reader is the murderer. My favorite example is that he did a year of world-building and invented characters he doesn't put into the novel, but he needed to know who they were in order to proceed. If you write genre fiction and understand that he believes it is inferior to literary fiction, you will be amused to see that his writing process sounds exactly like what you do to write your stories. He also explains why the book has such a slow, difficult beginning (he intentionally ignored the advice of friends and his editor to test your patience before letting you into the story). The book answers my question about why in the name of sanity Eco stops the action repeatedly to insert things like a long description of a tympanum (it's something a medieval writer would have done). If you've read the novel, if you are a fiction writer, or if you're into literary theory, you should probably pick up this book.

This book is an interesting peek into Umberto Eco's thoughts about his novel The Name of the Rose.