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Forget the books you want to write. Think only of the book you are writing.
- Henry Miller (from Henry Miller on Writing)
(Source: scottiehughes)
tagged with author
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For the writer of fiction everything has its testing point in the eye, and the eye is an organ that eventually involves the whole personality, and as much of the world as can be got into it.
- Flannery O’Connor, in the way of seeing as part of the “habit of art.” Read more.
Click image above to view a Charlie Rose video (Friday, April 13, 2012) interviewing Salman Rushdie, Martin Amis, James Fenton and Ian McEwan to discuss the life and work of Christopher Hitchens. Worth watching.
“I start in longhand and I write notes and messages and exaltations to myself… A ring-bound A4 green notebook, black ink always — and I press medium-hard.”
(Source: Guardian)
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Previously Unpublished Vonnegut Novella to Be Released
“The 22,000-word novella, ‘Basic Training,’ was rejected by the Saturday Evening Post in the late 1940’s, long before Mr. Vonnegut had become famous through works such as ‘Slaughterhouse-Five’ and ‘Cat’s Cradle.’”
“RosettaBooks described the novella as a book that demonstrates Mr. Vonnegut’s ‘trademark grand themes: the lunacy of kings, the improbability of existence, the yearling hero’s struggle with duty and love and the meaning of heroism.’”
What’s the lame part?: “It will be released exclusively through Amazon as a Kindle Single at a cost of $1.99.”
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In January I got a call from my agent. She said, and I’m paraphrasing, ‘You’ve been getting death threats, and we need to show them to you. Legal has talked it over. If we don’t show them to you, and you’re not aware of them, then if something happens to you, we are liable, and your parents can sue us. So we’re going to send you a packet of these death threats, and you can look through them, and verify that you have seen them.’ That was a very interesting afternoon.
- Bret Easton Ellis on reactions to American Psycho.
(Source: theparisreview.org)
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I think I have sort of gravitated toward issues that I don’t know the answers to because that’s what’s more interesting for me to write. The act of writing … is the act of trying to understand why my opinion is what it is. And ultimately, I think that’s the same experience the reader has when they pick up one of my books.
- Jodi Picoult
(Source: NPR)
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The writing became so fluid that I sometimes felt as if I were writing for the sheer pleasure of telling a story, which may be the human condition that most resembles levitation.
- Gabriel García Márquez
(Source: csmonitor.com)
Yes.
To be truthful, some writers stop you dead in your tracks by making you see your own work in the most unflattering light. Each of us will meet a different harbinger of personal failure, some innocent genius chosen by us for reasons having to do with what we see as our own inadequacies. The only remedy to this I have found is to read a writer whose work is entirely different from another, though not necessarily more like your own—a difference that will remind you of how many rooms there are in the house of art.”
― Francine Prose, Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them
Paul Auster: The one thing I try to do in all my books is to leave enough room in the prose for the reader to inhabit it. Because I finally believe that it’s the reader who writes the book and not the writer. In my own case as a reader (and I’ve certainly read more books than I’ve written!), I find that I almost invariably appropriate scenes and situations from a book and graft them onto my own experiences—or vice versa. In reading a book like Pride and Prejudice, for example, I realized at a certain point that all the events were set in the house I grew up in as a child. No matter how specific a writer’s description of a place might be, I always seem to twist it into something I’m familiar with. I’ve asked a number of my friends if this happens to them when they read fiction as well. For some yes, for others no. I think this probably has a lot to do with one’s relation to language, how one responds to words printed on a page. Whether the words are just symbols, or whether they are passageways into our unconscious.
Cormac McCarthy Pictionary
(Source: youtube.com)
Want.
“Mothers,” Tóibín writes, “get in the way of fiction; they take up the space that is better filled by indecision, by hope, by the slow growth of a personality, and by something more interesting and important as the novel itself developed. This was the idea of solitude, the idea that a key scene in a novel occurs when the heroine is alone… Thus her thoughts move inward, offering a drama not between generations, or between opinions, but within a wounded, deceived or conflicted self. The novel traces the mind at work, the mind in silence.” Read more of the review.
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