“If you are not discouraged about your writing on a regular basis, you may not be trying hard enough. Any challenging pursuit will encounter frequent patches of frustration. Writing is nothing if not challenging.”
–Maxwell Perkins
Source: Chip Scanlan’s “‘And I Quote’: A Collection of Advice, Inspiration and Other Words of Wisdom on the Craft of Writing.”
As I mentioned on my other blog awhile back, I’ve been looking forward to reading Allegra Goodman‘s new novel, The Cookbook Collector. I pre-ordered a copy and finally began reading on Sunday evening. So far, so great!
Last week, my mom and I attended a terrific literary event here in New York that featured Allegra and novelist Cathleen Schine in conversation with Sandee Brawarsky, book critic for the New York Jewish Week. At one point, Allegra offered the following comment about something that she sees as a real plus of novel-writing:
“Your work can be intensely personal without being autobiographical.”
So true! So important! So under-appreciated!
The degree of interest readers show in the autobiographical elements of fiction never fails to amaze me. Admittedly, I’ve been guilty of this interest as a reader, too. But I hope that my crimes are fewer and further between now that I have some experience as a fiction writer myself.
In truth, there are pieces of “me” in all of my fiction, even if I may be the only one who can pinpoint each of them. And the characters that might outwardly resemble “me”–one example comes to mind from a story workshopped long ago; several classmates told me they were convinced that one character in that story was, in fact, me, thinly disguised–can be the ones furthest from my own experience.
In an interview occasioned by the recent publication of his latest book, The Thieves of Manhattan (on my tbr list), Adam Langer was asked the following:
“Did you meet with early success, in terms of getting your first novel accepted for publication, or was it a long, hard road for you?”
Langer’s response offers this week’s “Quotation of the Week”:
“If I pretended that my first published novel, Crossing California, was actually the first novel I wrote, I’d say that it was easy. I’d say, yup, I finished the book, got an agent, got a contract, and started work on Book #2. But in saying that, I’d be ignoring the fact that my first novel, Making Tracks, a teen detective story written when I was in high school, is still in a drawer. And so is my second novel, It Takes All Kinds, a 300-page long screed about my first week at Vassar. Also, my third novel, A Rogue in the Limelight, a picaresque journey modeled on Huck Finn and The Confederacy of Dunces, never found the right agent, even though some people (well, my mother) have called it my best novel. One of my earliest agents said that my fourth novel, Indie Jones, a slacker comedy set in Chicago’s independent film world, would easily find a home at Doubleday, but that didn’t happen. And I stopped looking for an agent for my fifth novel, an existential thriller called American Soil, when I realized there was too much personal shit in it and I really didn’t want to deal with having it published. But yeah, once I finished Book #6, it was smooth sailing.”
Source: The Huffington Post
(Hat tip to Josh Lambert for the interview link.)
“No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.”
~Robert Frost
via Heidi Mannan
Since I often sense that I’m plot-challenged (and I was a fan of certain nighttime “soaps” back in the day), I loved this quotation, which I found via Twitter last week.
“If I want a plot I’ll watch ‘Dallas.'”
– Elizabeth Hardwick (interviewed in 1985)
Source: The Paris Review