9 of 76 facts you might not know about Michael Ondaatje

12. An ideal writing day, according to Ondaatje, entails working from 9:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. where he concentrates on his writing and nothing else: "The only rule I have is don't go out for lunch. That takes two hours, and you can eat a sandwich in eight minutes or so."

34. Ondaatje admires the music of American saxophonist Ornette Coleman and adopts the musician's creative approach to his own writing when starting a new book: "(T)here's a great line by Ornette Coleman — the thing you play at the beginning is a territory. What follows is the adventure."

36. In a 2018 interview, he told Writers & Company's Eleanor Wachtel that a love of cartography partly inspired novel Warlight: "I just love looking at maps. The visual beauty of them fascinates me. And I know many artists do drawings on top of maps which are always beautiful."

38. In a 1992 interview with Eleanor Wachtel, Ondaatje says poetry didn't teach him how to write beautifully, rather it taught him how to structure novels: "You can leave a lot more for the reader to fill in... [Poetry's] taught me how to write a certain kind of novel and also to believe in the tightness and concreteness of words."¹

52. For research on In the Skin of a Lion, Ondaatje used a Ouija board and asked "How did Ambrose Small die?" The answer he received was "elated."³

54. In a 2018 interview with Publishers Weekly, Ondaatje compares his writing process to archaeology: "I don't really know the characters before the book is written — they're not fully formed yet," he explains, saying that he needs to "live with the possibilities of characters for a period of time."

55. Ondaatje admitted to the Toronto Star that he doesn't plan his novels in advance and actually knows very little about what's going to happen in them until he writes it.

61. Ondaatje says there was a perverse pleasure in titling one of his poetry collections Handwriting because people have complained about his handwriting for years.

66. Ondaatje has said when he gets stuck writing, he just works on a different scene.

https://www.cbc.ca/books/76-facts-you-might-not-know-about-michael-ondaatje-1.4818926