To take a page from my friend John Ettorre’s blog playbook (a guy whose writing I admire and who’s given me valuable advice in the past), here are a few excerpts from a great article on the novelist Ethan Canin in the July/August issue of Poets & Writers Magazine. (Don’t think the article is online, sadly.)
Canin tells what it’s like to write a novel and to be a writer in general, and it’s not what first-time or wanna-be writers imagine it always to be, namely, something glamorous and easy and natural:
“Someone said writing a novel is like walking from Vladivostok to Gibraltar on your knees. That’s the way I feel about it.”
Or what former student Nam Le recalls about Canin’s attitude toward the novel-writing project:
“… chiefly… writing is a long slog that’s unending. … That’s not to say there aren’t incredible pleasures and satisfactions or that he didn’t inspire ut to keep going through all the troubles. But he was never shy about expressing the fact that, in his mind, writing wasn’t always, in the moment, pleasurable.”
4 users commented in " On Writing "
Follow-up comment rss or Leave a TrackbackP&W is a remarkable read, isn’t it, Miles? They only put a little of their material online, though more than they used to, but the best stuff is reserved for subscribers. That’s a pub that’s certainly worth investing in.
By the way, that last quote you point to reminds me of a truism that even grizzled veteran writers can be heard saying from time to time: “I prefer having written to writing.”
It is a great read and I’m glad I subscribed to it about two years ago.
I like the truism, too. The flip side to that, though, is that after I’ve written something and it’s published, I feel like it’s dead to me, or at the very least it isn’t alive the way a work in progress is.
Nicely said. I (and probably just about anyone who writes) knows precisely what you mean. I’ve come to think of it as a form of post-partum depression, this half-mourning and mental moving on from finished projects. At the same time, you’ll occasionally (or more often if you’re lucky) come across something you wrote some years ago, and upon rereading it, think it’s stood the test of time pretty well. That’s a good feeling.
Leave A Reply