Official website of the author
I don’t think you know what you’re writing about until you’re actually doing it. You say to yourself, “What’s this about?” I thought, to a degree, Carrie was about the empowerment of a girl who was standing up for herself. I was interested in the idea that Carrie would pull the house down. I just didn’t know what the house was when I started writing the book.
Stephen King
E.B. White worked in a 10- by 15-foot wooden shack, originally built as a boathouse, at his home in North Brooklin, Maine. Photo by Jill Krementz. A visitor in 2017 wrote,
The small boathouse was down a gentle slope, just a few paces from the water … It looked much like it did in the famous Jill Krementz photo of White working in it: the bench; the writing table; the blue metal ashtray; a croquet-case-turned-cupboard; a list of New Yorker “newsbreak” headlines pinned to the wall. … [The] Whites’ caretaker would transport the typewriter down to the boathouse in a truck, while Andy walked, and pick it up at the end of the day.
In 1949, reviewing a book on writing by an author who “gets a great deal done,” White wrote (in the New Yorker’s distinctive we/our style):
Now turn for a moment to your correspondent. The thought of writing hangs over our mind like an ugly cloud, making us apprehensive and depressed, as before a summer storm, so that we begin the day by subsiding after breakfast, or by going away, often to seedy and inconclusive destinations: the nearest zoo, or a branch post office to buy a few stamped envelopes. Our professional life has been a long, shameless exercise in avoidance. Our home is designed for the maximum of interruption, our office is the place where we never are. From his remarks, we gather that Roberts is contemptuous of this temperament and setup, regards it as largely a pose and certainly a deficiency in blood. It has occurred to us that perhaps we are not a writer at all but merely a bright clerk who persists in crowding his destiny. Yet the record is there. Not even lying down and closing the blinds stops us from writing; not even our family, and our preoccupation with same, stops us.
Today is the release day for the paperback edition of All That Is Mine I Carry With Me. I’ve been doing this a long time now, but it just never gets old. Seeing my name on a book cover is still exciting.
What little I’ve accomplished has been by the most laborious and uphill work, and I wish now I’d never relaxed or looked back — but said at the end of The Great Gatsby: “I’ve found my line — from now on this comes first. This is my immediate duty — without this I am nothing.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Years ago, on a trip to England, I visited the Globe Theatre where an actor recited Shakespeare’s words in their original pronunciation. Until then, I had no idea how different the same words sounded in Shakespeare’s time. Remarkable. (Via Kottke.)
There’s a healthier way of thinking about creativity that the musician Brian Eno refers to as “scenius.” Under this model, great ideas are often birthed by a group of creative individuals — artists, curators, thinkers, theorists, and other tastemakers — who make up an “ecology of talent.” If you look back closely at history, many of the people who we think of as lone geniuses were actually part of “a whole scene of people who were supporting each other, looking at each other’s work, copying from each other, stealing ideas, and contributing ideas.” Scenius doesn’t take away from the achievements of those great individuals: it just acknowledges that good work isn’t created in a vacuum, and that creativity is always, in some sense, a collaboration, the result of a mind connected to other minds.
— Austin Kleon (via Kottke)
It’s something like a person walking toward you through a mist: Every sentence you write about her makes her a little clearer.
Recently I updated this website to a more modern design. That required a review (still ongoing) of a lot of old blog posts whose format was not compatible with the new code. In the course of rummaging around in all that old material (the blog dates to May 2009), I came across this little article that I published on Esquire magazine’s website in 2007. It was part of a series called “The Last Line.” I had completely forgotten the piece. In it, I discuss the novel that, years later, would become Defending Jacob. Interesting how much I knew early on and also how little. Novel writing is a journey; here I am taking the first steps.
Our question: “What is the last sentence you wrote and why?” Master of suspense William Landay answers and still manages to keep us guessing. (Published: Jul 31, 2007)
“I don’t know what I expected to find, blood stains or some such, but there was none of that.”
Why he wrote the last line: This line is from a first draft of a novel I’m working on. The story is told by Andy Lewis, a father approaching middle age, an ordinary suburban guy whose son is accused of that most extraordinary crime, murder. The son does not deny the murder but claims self-defense. In this scene, Andy, who happens to be a prosecutor, has wandered to the scene of the murder, alone, ostensibly to look for evidence.
That he finds none is important to me. It announces that this is not going to be another CSI-style mystery. The story will not turn on the arcana of forensic science. (“Aha! A hair follicle!”) I will tell you almost at the outset what happened, what this kid did, and you will read on anyway, to find out why he did it.
With this book I am moving away from the traditional plot-driven sort of mystery-suspense and toward a more psychological, interior sort of story. My first two novels are dissimilar in a lot of ways, but they are alike in one critical sense: both are intricate, tightly plotted mysteries. They are suspenseful in the way traditional mysteries are, which is to say, it matters “who dun it.” At least, it matters what exactly was done.
In my new book, which has no title yet, the suspense is not so much about who did what — that much is clear in the first few pages — but why he did it and how the crime affects everyone involved.
This story is a mystery, then, in the way all great stories are mysteries. The greatest mystery of all is other people, and understanding other people — empathizing, imagining what it like to be someone else — is the essential power of novels. I’d go so far as to say that recreating the interior, conscious experience of another person is the thing that novels do better than any other dramatic form.
I happen to have two sons, and I love them to no end. But they are individuals, with their own minds and their own wills. I can’t hope to know what it is really like to be them, what they think and feel. Like any fathers and sons, we are mysteries to one another. I think that’s a universal feeling. As fathers or sons, or mothers or daughters, we’ve all asked at some time or other, “What was he thinking?” This story simply imagines that question in an extreme situation: What if someone close to you, someone you loved and thought you knew, did something truly horrifying and unfathomable?