Deadline hell has arrived. Just sayin’, that’s all.
Here’s a small portion of a Stephen King interview with The Paris Review: In every life you get to a point where you have to deal with something that�s inexplicable to you, whether it�s the doctor saying you have cancer or a prank phone call. So whether you talk about ghosts or vampires or Nazi war criminals living down the block, we�re still talking about the same thing, which is an intrusion of the extraordinary into ordinary life and how we deal with it. What that shows about our character and our interactions with others and the society we live in interests me a lot more than monsters and vampires and ghouls and ghosts.
Actually, the Paris Review is a gold mine of author interviews from the 1950’s to the present, some of which can be downloaded in .pdf format. Unfortuately, their interview with Faulkner is not one of those, but this is still a good quote: Let the writer take up surgery or bricklaying if he is interested in technique. There is no mechanical way to get the writing done, no shortcut. The young writer would be a fool to follow a theory. Teach yourself by your own mistakes; people learn only by error. The good artist believes that nobody is good enough to give him advice. He has supreme vanity. No matter how much he admires the old writer, be wants to beat him.
Other nice lines from the site:
Dorothy Parker: Gertrude Stein did us the most harm when she said, ‘You’re all a lost generation.’ That got around to certain people and we all said, ‘Whee! We’re lost.’
Jack Kerouac: I spent my entire youth writing slowly with revisions and endless rehashing, speculation and deleting and got so I was writing one sentence a day and the sentence had no FEELING. Goddamn it, FEELING is what I like in art, not CRAFTINESS and the hiding of feelings.
Henry Miller: I believe in saying the truth, coming out with it cold, shocking if necessary, not disguising it. In other words, obscenity is a cleansing process, whereas pornography only adds to the murk.
Italo Calvino: …it must be pointed out that childhood boredom is a special kind of boredom. It is a boredom full of dreams, a sort of projection into another place, into another reality. In adulthood, boredom is made of repetition, it is the continuation of something from which we are no longer expecting any surprise. And I . . . would that I had time to get bored today! What I do have is the fear of repeating myself in my literary work. This is the reason that every time I must come up with a new challenge to face, I must find something to do that will look like a novelty, something a little beyond my capabilities.
Peter Carey, on sitting down to write: It’s like standing on the edge of a cliff. This is especially true of the first draft. Every day you’re making up the earth you’re going to stand on.
Have a great day, everyone! Write well and read hard.