Alert! Let’s face it: if you want to be successful, really successful, as a writer, you have to put in the hours. Exactly how you structure this putting in of the hours is up to you, but you still gotta do it. In a terrific piece that has nothing to do with SA Lit but cries out for as wide a readership as possible, Alexandra Alter of the Wall Street Journal gets Michael Ondaatje, Kazuo Ishiguro, Orhun Pamuk, Hilary Mantel and a number of other big pens to share their main habits of the craft. Entertaining and essential reading:
Orhun Pamuk
Turkish novelist and Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk often rewrites the first line of his novels 50 or 100 times. “The hardest thing is always the first sentence—that is painful,” says Mr. Pamuk, whose book, “The Museum of Innocence,” a love story set in 1970s Istanbul, came out last month.
Mr. Pamuk writes by hand, in graph-paper notebooks, filling a page with prose and leaving the adjacent page blank for revisions, which he inserts with dialogue-like balloons. He sends his notebooks to a speed typist who returns them as typed manuscripts; then he marks the pages up and sends them back to be retyped. The cycle continues three or four times.
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November 10th, 2009 @12:42 #
Riveting and often funny. Good sequel to Gappah's piece.
November 10th, 2009 @12:50 #
Super article. Just goes to show there's no right way and that the only common thread is time and a bit of obsession.
November 10th, 2009 @15:05 #
A fascinating read. For some reason it brings to mind a discussion we had on this site ages ago about where we write. As I recall, we had all been waxing lyrical about our Work Spaces when Sally Partridge came on line and said that she doesn't have a study - she just writes wherever she and her laptop happen to be.
I think the less pretentious the writer, the less inclined to disappear up his own backside he is.
November 10th, 2009 @17:27 #
There's an apocryphal story about the original Getty telling a young journalist who asked him how to make a fortune: 'wake up early, work hard, discover an oilfield.' These famous writers made me think of that. It does not matter how you wake up early, or in what way you work hard, to be a fabulous writer you still need that goddam oilfield. ANd not everyone has one in the little patch that they are excavating.
November 10th, 2009 @17:33 #
Brilliant, Margie. The ethos and philosophy of writing in one succinct metaphor. Will quote you on this.
November 10th, 2009 @21:28 #
Wicked, a real gem of an article. Thanks for this Alert, Ben.