Tag: Being a Writer

Smart Advice from Smart People

Writing Advice Picked Up on the Weekend

The cold that chased me through the Rabbit Hole and Continuum finally caught up with me over the last weekend. I picked up a couple of books to keep me entertained over the weekend of coughing, spluttering, and spending some quality time in bed. By the time you read this, I’ll have spent two days living on cold-and-flu tablets and Peter Corris novels, in addition to some non-fiction in the form of The Believer Book of Writers Talking to Writers.  Thus far, my favourite entry has been a conversation between Paul Aster and Jonothan Letham, which included one of those perfect answers you can’t help sharing: PA: You try to surprise yourself. You go against what you’ve done before. You want to burn up and destroy all your previous work; you want to reinvent yourself with every project. Once you fall into habits, I think, you’re dead as an artist. You have to challenge yourself and never rest on your laurels,

Smart Advice from Smart People

You must be prepared to work always without applause…

You must be prepared to work always without applause. When you are excited about something is when the first draft is done. But no one can see it until you have gone over it again and again until you have communicated the emotion, the sights, and the sounds to the reader, and by the time you have completed this the words, sometimes, will not make sense to you you read them, so many times have you re-read them. By the time the book comes out you will have started something else and it is all behind you and you do not want to hear about it. But you do, you read it in covers and you see all the places that now you can do nothing about. All the critics who could not make their reputations by discovering you are hoping to make them by predicting hopefully your approaching impotence, failure, and general drying up of natural juices. Not a