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.
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
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.
A wonderful recent interview with Ian McEwan, one of my idols. The image of him at his writing desk, above, is like a dream of how a writer’s study ought to look. Full interview below.
By design, Milch wrote “Deadwood” under a gun-to-the-head deadline, regularly composing dialogue the day before a scene was to be shot. Milch is the only writer I have ever watched, at length, write. I sat in a dimly lit, air-conditioned trailer as Milch—surrounded by several silent acolytes, of varying degrees of experience and career accomplishment—sprawled on the floor in the middle of the room, staring at a large computer monitor a few feet away. An assistant at a keyboard took dictation as Milch, seemingly channeling voices from a remote dimension, put words into (and took words out of) the mouth of this or that character. The cursor on the screen advanced and retreated until the exchange sounded precisely right. The methodology evoked a séance, and it was necessary to remind oneself that the voices in fact issued from a certain precinct of the fellow on the floor’s brain.
Concentrate your narrative energy on the point of change. This is especially important for historical fiction. When your character is new to a place, or things alter around them, that’s the point to step back and fill in the details of their world. People don’t notice their everyday surroundings and daily routine, so when writers describe them it can sound as if they’re trying too hard to instruct the reader.