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Famous writers on The Block

blacbird

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Richard Layman said:
It's very encouraging to discover that much of what is being bought and published day in and day out is complete, utter, stinking crap.

It's utterly, flatteningly, discouraging to discover that much of what is being bought and published day in and day out is complete, utter, stinking crap, and that it got published and what you have written never does, and therefore must only be even worse.

caw
 

ap123

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It's utterly, flatteningly, discouraging to discover that much of what is being bought and published day in and day out is complete, utter, stinking crap, and that it got published and what you have written never does, and therefore must only be even worse.

caw

Completely agree with you here, blacbird. I think that "discovery" can be great for getting started (whether you think much out there is out and out crap or plain old no better than what you can produce), but. :( I'm at a point where I suspect my judgement is skewed and my taste must be out and out horrid.
 

dondomat

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Kingsley Amis on working up your nerve and writing in short focused daily bursts

From an interview with my favorite post-WWII literary novelist, Mr. Kingsley Amis.


INTERVIEWER
Does drink play any part in your creative life?

AMIS
Well, it may play an adverse part . . .
INTERVIEWER​
Presumably you can’t write when you’ve drunk too much?
AMIS​
No, there comes a fairly early point when the stimulating effect turns into an effect that produces disorder and incoherence. But I find writing very nervous work. I’m always in a dither when starting a novel—that’s the worst time. It’s like going to the dentist, because you do make a kind of appointment with yourself. And this is one of the things I’ve learnt to recognize more and more with experience: that you realize it’s got to be . . . next week. Not today—but if you don’t sit down by the end of next week, it’ll go off the boil slightly. Well, it can’t be next Wednesday, because somebody from The Paris Review is coming to interview you, so it had better be Thursday. And then, quaking, you sit down at the typewriter. And that’s when a glass of Scotch can be very useful as a sort of artistic icebreaker . . . artificial infusion of a little bit of confidence which is necessary in order to begin at all. And then each day’s sitting down is still rather tense, though the tension goes away as the novel progresses, and when the end is even distantly in sight, the strain becomes small, though it’s always there. So alcohol in moderate amounts and at a fairly leisurely speed is valuable to me—at least I think so. It could be that I could have written better without it . . . but it could also be true that I’d have written far less without it.
INTERVIEWER​
Do you have a daily routine?
AMIS​
Yes. I don’t get up very early. I linger over breakfast reading the papers, telling myself hypocritically that I’ve got to keep up with what’s going on, but really staving off the dreadful time when I have to go to the typewriter. That’s probably about ten-thirty, still in pajamas and dressing gown. And the agreement I have with myself is that I can stop whenever I like and go and shave and shower and so on. In practice, it’s not till about one or one-fifteen that I do that—I usually try and time it with some music on the radio. Then I emerge, and nicotine and alcohol are produced. I work on until about two or two-fifteen, have lunch, then if there’s urgency about, I have to write in the afternoon, which I really hate doing—I really dislike afternoons, whatever’s happening. But then the agreement is that it doesn’t matter how little gets done in the afternoon. And later on, with luck, a cup of tea turns up, and then it’s only a question of drinking more cups of tea until the bar opens at six o’clock and one can get into second gear. I go on until about eight-thirty and I always hate stopping. It’s not a question of being carried away by one’s creative afflatus, but saying, “Oh dear, next time I do this I shall be feeling tense again.”
He actually published about a novel a year by this system, all of them excellent.
 
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dondomat

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Philip Roth on false starts

Another highly prolific literary giant, who knows what he's looking for and works away for months, until he sees the germ of something actually awesome beginning to appear.

INTERVIEWER
How do you get started on a new book?
PHILIP ROTH
Beginning a book is unpleasant. I’m entirely uncertain about the character and the predicament, and a character in his predicament is what I have to begin with. Worse than not knowing your subject is not knowing how to treat it, because that’s finally everything. I type out beginnings and they’re awful, more of an unconscious parody of my previous book than the breakaway from it that I want. I need something driving down the center of a book, a magnet to draw everything to it—that’s what I look for during the first months of writing something new. I often have to write a hundred pages or more before there’s a paragraph that’s alive. Okay, I say to myself, that’s your beginning, start there; that’s the first paragraph of the book. I’ll go over the first six months of work and underline in red a paragraph, a sentence, sometimes no more than a phrase, that has some life in it, and then I’ll type all these out on one page. Usually it doesn’t come to more than one page, but if I’m lucky, that’s the start of page one. I look for the liveliness to set the tone. After the awful beginning come the months of freewheeling play, and after the play come the crises, turning against your material and hating the book.

The knowledge that for half a year, he was full-time busy at writing lifeless crud did not deter him. He knew he had to gather speed and then and only then, would the real book begin to take shape. Yes, giving yourself permission to write crap is indeed a thing. But one has to be able to tell when real sentences and paragraph begin to appear, and use them as the nucleus of the real book.

Additional gems:

INTERVIEWER
How much of a book is in your mind before you start?
ROTH​
What matters most isn’t there at all. I don’t mean the solutions to problems, I mean the problems themselves. You’re looking, as you begin, for what’s going to resist you. You’re looking for trouble. Sometimes in the beginning uncertainty arises not because the writing is difficult, but because it isn’t difficult enough. Fluency can be a sign that nothing is happening; fluency can actually be my signal to stop, while being in the dark from sentence to sentence is what convinces me to go on.
INTERVIEWER​
Must you have a beginning? Would you ever begin with an ending?
ROTH​
For all I know I am beginning with the ending. My page one can wind up a year later as page two hundred, if it’s still even around.
 
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dondomat

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Paul Auster on allowing yourself to NOT be a towering genious

Glad they're working; I'm on a roll today.

One of the most celebrated literary stars of today, sharing a sentiment very close to that of Mario Puzo, who only wrote his mastepiece--The Godfather--after he gave himself permission to not strive for titanic brilliance.

INTERVIEWER
You died as a poet, but eventually you were reborn as a novelist. How do you think this transformation came about?
AUSTER​
I think it happened at the moment when I understood that I didn’t care anymore, when I stopped caring about making Literature. I know it sounds strange, but from that point on writing became a different kind of experience for me and when I finally got going again after wallowing in the doldrums for about a year, the words came out as prose. The only thing that mattered was saying the thing that needed to be said. Without regard to preestablished conventions, without worrying about what it sounded like. That was the late seventies and I’ve continued working in that spirit ever since.
 

dondomat

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James Ellroy on outlining the outline of the outline

Some people, in spite of their books reading like they were written in one breath over a booze-fueled weekend, are actually achieving the effect by creating a complex systemic scaffolding superstructure and only then doing the actual drafting and editing.
(Last inspirational chunk for today. The Paris Review is a goldmine. Thank you for existing, Paris Review!)

INTERVIEWER
How do you begin writing a novel?​
ELLROY​
I begin by sitting in the dark. I used to sleep on the living-room couch. There was a while when that was the only place I felt safe. My couch is long because I’m tall, and it needs to be high backed, so I can curl into it. I lie there and things come to me, very slowly.​
INTERVIEWER​
What happens after the sitting-in-the-dark phase?​
ELLROY​
I take notes: ideas, historical perspective, characters, point of view. Very quickly, much of the narrative coheres. When I have sufficient information—the key action, the love stories, the intrigue, the conclusion—I write out a synopsis in shorthand as fast as I can, for comprehension’s sake. With the new novel, Blood’s a Rover, this took me six days. It’s then, after I’ve got the prospectus, that I write the outline.​
The first part of the outline is a descriptive summary of each character. Next I describe the design of the book in some detail. I state my intent at the outset. Then I go through the entire novel, outlining every chapter. The outline of Blood’s A Rover is nearly four hundred pages long. It took me eight months to write. I write in the present tense, even if the novel isn’t written in the present tense. It reads like stage directions in a screenplay. Everything I need to know is right there in front of me. It allows me to keep the whole story in my mind. I use this method for every book.​
INTERVIEWER​
Your outlines resemble first drafts. Is that how you think of them?​
ELLROY​
I think of the outline as a diagram, a superstructure. When you see dialogue in one of my outlines, it’s because inserting the dialogue is the most complete, expeditious way to describe a given scene.​
INTERVIEWER​
Do you force yourself to write a certain number of words each day?​
ELLROY​
I set a goal of outlined pages that I want to get through each day. It’s the ratio of text pages to outline pages that’s important. That proportion determines everything. Today I went through five pages of the outline. That equals about eight pages of the novel. The outline for Blood’s a Rover, which is three hundred and ninety-seven pages, is exponentially more detailed than the three-hundred-and-forty-five-page outline for The Cold Six Thousand. So the ratio of book pages to outline pages varies, depending on the density of the outline.​
INTERVIEWER​
Is it important for you to have a steady writing routine?​
ELLROY​
I need to work just as rigorously on the outline as I do on the actual writing of the text, in order to keep track of the plot and the chronology. But once I’m writing text, I can be flexible, because the outline is there. Take today: I woke up early, at five-thirty. I worked for a couple of hours, took a break for some oatmeal, shut my eyes for a moment, and went back at it. I was overcaffeinated, jittery-assed, panic-attacky. Sometimes I go until I just can’t go anymore. I flatline and need some peace.​

And this is exactly how I'm working on my current novel. Prospectus, then outline, then draft, then...victory!
Great to know I'm not the only one using this method.
 
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dondomat

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Mario Vargas Llosa on blunt determination and iron discipline vs inspiration

The titan of lit fic from Peru:

INTERVIEWER
Victor Hugo, among other writers, believed in the magical force of inspiration. Gabriel García Márquez said that after years of struggling with One Hundred Years of Solitude, the novel wrote itself in his head during a trip to Acapulco in a car. You have just stated that inspiration is for you a product of discipline, but have you never known the famous “illumination”?

VARGAS LLOSA
It’s never happened to me. It’s a much slower process. In the beginning there’s something very nebulous, a state of alert, a wariness, a curiosity. Something I perceive in the fog and vagueness that arouses my interest, curiosity, and excitement, and then translates itself into work, note cards, the summary of the plot. Then when I have the outline and start to put things in order, something very diffuse, very nebulous still persists. The “illumination” only occurs during the work. It’s the hard work that, at any given time, can unleash that . . . heightened perception, that excitement capable of bringing about revelation, solution, and light. When I reach the heart of a story I’ve been working on for some time, then, yes, something does happen. The story ceases to be cold, unrelated to me. On the contrary, it becomes so alive, so important that everything I experience exists only in relation to what I’m writing. Everything I hear, see, read seems in one way or another to help my work. I become a kind of cannibal of reality. But to reach this state, I have to go through the catharsis of work. I live a kind of permanent double life. I do a thousand different things but I always have my mind on my work. Obviously, sometimes it becomes obsessive, neurotic. During those times, seeing a movie relaxes me. At the end of a day of intense work, when I find myself in a state of great inner turmoil, a movie does me a great deal of good.


/......./
INTERVIEWER
So, for a certain time, your characters are not related to each other? Each has his or her own personal history?

VARGAS LLOSA
In the beginning, everything is so cold, so artificial and dead! Little by little, it all begins to come alive, as each character takes on associations and relationships. That’s what is wonderful and fascinating: when you begin to discover that lines of force already exist naturally in the story

Another man in the Roth camp of wading in and writing a quadruple amount of words and scenes until little by little the book and characters start coming to life, and then it's time to cut away the weak stuff and enhance the strong stuff until the the novel is ready.
 
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dondomat

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Iris Murdoch on choosing themes and names before outlining the outline of the outline

Another towering figure in literary fiction. As we can see, with the most brilliant writers of their generations a certain trend is visible: they may be afraid of the white page, they may need a year to figure out the theme and characters before writing sentence one, they may need to write in a torrent of crap for another year before some gold starts appearing in between the sand--but all this does not stop them. Year after year this is what they do. The fear, the uncertainty, the agony, the endless work, most of which yet may have to be thrown away--it's all part of the game when you're decided to do what it takes to be the best of the best.

INTERVIEWER
You are remarkably prolific as a novelist. You seem to enjoy writing a great deal.
MURDOCH​
Yes, I do enjoy it, but it has, of course—I mean, this is true of any art form—moments when you think it’s awful, you lose confidence and it’s all black. You can’t think and so on. So, it’s not all enjoyment. But I don’t actually find writing in itself difficult. The creation of the story is the agonizing part. You have the extraordinary experience when you begin a novel that you are now in a state of unlimited freedom, and this is alarming. Every choice you make will exclude another choice, so that it’s rather important what happens then, what state of mind you’re in and what you think matters. Books should have themes. I choose titles carefully and the titles in some way indicate something deep in the theme of the book. Names are important. The names sometimes don’t come at once, but the physical being and the mind of the character have to come pretty early on and you just have to wait for the gods to offer you something. You have to spend a lot of time looking out of the window and writing down scrappy notes that may or may not help. You have to wait patiently until you feel that you’re getting the thing right—who the people are, what it’s all about, how it moves. I may take a long time, say a year, just sitting and fishing around, putting the thing into some sort of shape. Then I do a very detailed synopsis of every chapter, every conversation, everything that happens. That would be another operation.
 
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dondomat

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Samuel Delany on beating dyslexia--revise, revise, revise, revise

Black gay dude with dyslexia, who started publishing the best sci-fi of his generation in the early 1960's when he himself was in his early twenties, and went on to become one of the most respected names in sci-fi, fantasy and high literature to this day--a sort of male Ursula le Guin--and a university professor.



INTERVIEWER​
How did your dyslexia manifest itself?
DELANY​
I had, and have, no visual ability to remember how words are put together. I can recognize them when I see them. But unless they’re in front of me, I can’t recall the vowels they contain. I have no command over whether they contain single or double letters. The closest metaphor I can come up with is that it’s like being able to recognize hundreds of different faces but being incapable of producing any sort of likeness of any of them with a pencil and paper. I know all the rules—“i before e, except after c, or when sounded as ay as in neighbor or weigh”—and still cannot put down the words correctly. At the same time, I read omnivorously.
/...../

The dyslexia didn’t much hamper my reading. What it affected was my writing. I couldn’t spell anything! In an early short story I wrote, a woman who works in a five-and-ten at one point exclaims, “Customers! Customers! Customers!” All three were spelled differently—and all three wrong. I could not spell the word paper three times right in a row!
/...../
INTERVIEWER
Do you revise every day?
DELANY​
Pretty much so, except the days or the hours I devote to writing a first draft. Eighty-five to ninety-five percent of my work is rewriting and revision. Probably that started as a strategy to deal with the wages of dyslexia. Now it’s habit, but it was a fortunate habit to acquire.
 
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Re-modernist

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Deborah Eisenberg:
There’s an incredibly inflexible set of instruments—our vocabulary, our grammar, the abstract symbols on paper, the limitations of your own powers of expression. You write something down and it’s awkward, trivial, artificial, approximate. But with effort you can get it to become a little flexible, a little transparent. You can get it to open up, and expose something lurking there beyond the clumsy thing you first put down. When you add a comma or add or subtract a word, and the thing reacts and changes, it’s so exciting that you forget how absolutely terrible writing feels a lot of the time.
(....)
EISENBERG
You write something and there’s no reality to it. You can’t inject it with any kind of reality. You have to be patient and keep going, and then, one day, you can feel something signaling to you from the innermost recesses. Like a little person trapped under the rubble of an earthquake. And very, very, very slowly you find your way toward the little bit of living impulse. Of course, many writers manage to condense the process, but things accrue reality through all the millions of unconscious operations that go into writing.


INTERVIEWER​
Once you’ve caught a scent of that little bit of life, what then?


EISENBERG​
Then I have a big mess on my hands for quite some time. So I ask, What is this and what is this and what is this? I go about things as a hamster would— That’s good, I want this little piece of straw. That’s bad, get it out of the nest. Somehow I have a feeling, Well, this applies in some way. I may not know how, and I may not know why, but I can tell that here’s something connected to something central.
 
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Re-modernist

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Jonathan Franzen:

Each succeeding novel of mine has felt like the hardest to write. This partly has to do with my expectation that the work ought to become easier as I become more practised. But every time I try to start a novel I feel like I’ve never written one before – the whole process has to be rediscovered, reinvented. It’s similar to tennis: there are days when I go out on the court and the racquet feels like some Neanderthal club that I’ve never touched in my life. I take a certain amount of pride in my inability to become a professional novelist. But it can be excruciating from day to day.

- - - Updated - - -
 
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JimmyB27

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I always liked Stephen King's anecdote about James Joyce in 'On Writing':

“A friend came to visit James Joyce one day and found the great man sprawled across his writing desk in a posture of utter despair.


James, what’s wrong?' the friend asked. 'Is it the work?'


Joyce indicated assent without even raising his head to look at his friend. Of course it was the work; isn’t it always?


How many words did you get today?' the friend pursued.


Joyce (still in despair, still sprawled facedown on his desk): 'Seven.'


Seven? But James… that’s good, at least for you.'


Yes,' Joyce said, finally looking up. 'I suppose it is… but I don’t know what order they go in!”
 

brightmind

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Sometimes you have to go even if you don't feel like it. That part I like!
 

Madzianta

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“Writing about writer’s block is better than not writing at all.”—Charles Bukowski