Learning from The Corrections

In an interview on Powells.com, Jonathan Franzen says of The Corrections, "The real pleasure in writing this, for me, was discovering how little you need." His previous books had been very heavily plotted, and even some sections of The Corrections are plotted, as he says, like a short novel, "a single situation and the screws tightened maximally on the characters in question." But through writing most of the novel he learned to take all the plot directions and ramifications away and leave the "one paragraph of distress that interested me."