Writers on Writing
WSJ has a piece on the working habits of novelists. The individual pieces are short–three or four short paragraphs each–but interesting. And there are a few dozen: Nicholson Baker, Kazuroa Ishaguro, Margaret Atwood, Junot Diaz, and more. One commonality is their willingness to throw something away when it’s not working. Here’s Ishaguro on a discarded novel set in medieval Britain:
“I showed my wife a segment that I had honed down and she said, “This is awful. You have to figure out how they speak to each other. They’re speaking in a moron language,”
[via John Jones' Twitter feed]
