oliver yeh

Updike and Oates are extreme examples, but there’s something to be said for what might be called the Woody Allen Method: Good times, bad times, you keep making art. Many of your productions will hit; some will miss; some will miss by a lot. But there’s no time for the flatulent gas of pretension to seep into your construction’s sheetrock. This is how Trollope, Balzac and Dickens worked. Each would have agreed with Gore Vidal, who once declared of those who moan about writer’s block: “You’re not meant to be doing this. Plenty more where you came from.

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Dwight Garner, in “Dear Important Novelists: Be Less Like Moses and More Like Howard Cosell,” an essay on the amount of time some writers take to produce their works. He’s not proposing a hastiness to the process or a shortening of lengths…

It’s worth suggesting, though, that something more meaningful may be going on here; these long spans between books may indicate a desalinating tidal change in the place novelists occupy in our culture. Suddenly our important writers seem less like color commentators, sifting through the emotional, sexual and intellectual detritus of how we live today, and more like a mountaintop Moses, handing down the granite tablets every decade or so to a bemused and stooped populace. We roll our eyes at how seldom Time magazine puts writers on its cover — it once did so quite often — and sense this is evidence of the public’s shrinking appetite for quality literature. Perhaps it has got more to do with our novelists’ lagging output, their eroded willingness to be central to the cultural conversation.

(Source: The New York Times)

First-person storytelling turned out to be a lot harder than I had anticipated: the whole business of conveying things to the reader that the narrator himself can’t see, or doesn’t want to; hoping readers won’t mind not liking him. Depicting his moral decline – which is what the book is ultimately about — through his voice was tough. But I think the hardest part of any extended piece of writing is sustaining the morale of the author.

- AD Miller, author of Snowdrops which is shortlisted for the 2011 Booker Prize.

(Source: Guardian)

Care about what other people think and you will always be their prisoner.

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Lao Tzu (via missfolly)

… and write about what you think others want to read and you will always be their prisoner…

Very occasionally, you feel you’ve got a scene or passage right and true; that you managed to put down what you were hoping to. There are a few bits of Snowdrops in that category. Oddly they mostly involve torture of one kind or another.

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AD Miller, author of Snowdrops which is shortlisted for the 2011 Booker Prize.

(Source: Guardian)

Novel writing, I soon discovered, is like channel swimming: a slow and steady stroke over a long distance in a cold, dark sea.

- Ann Patchett, from ”The Getaway Car.”

(Source: Los Angeles Times)

Despite the swirl of anxieties people can get into about how to cope in the every changing world of literary commerce, getting published isn’t the ultimate challenge. Making good work is. The rest will take care of itself. Or it won’t. But if it doesn’t, you’ll still be an artist. Success alone won’t make you one.

- Adam Haslett, award winning author of You Are Not a Stranger Here.

(Source: thedaysofyore.com)