Tag: writers

Success: Deserve Has Nothing to Do With It

~ cafebedouin ~ 3 Comments

“It’s fashionable now to object on principle to the idea that writing is hard. Writing isn’t hard, this camp says; working in coal mines is hard. Having a baby is hard. But this is a category error. Writing isn’t hard the way physical labor, or recovery from surgery, is hard; it’s hard the way math or physics is hard, the way chess is hard. What’s hard about art is getting any good—and then getting better. What’s hard is solving problems with infinite solutions and your finite brain.

….The thing about success, good fortune, and maybe even happiness is this: You can see that there are people who “deserve” whatever you have as much as you do but have less, as well as people who “deserve” it less or equally and have more. So, at the same time, you want more and feel you don’t deserve what you have. It’s a source of anxiety, guilt, and resentment and troubles the very idea of what one “deserves.” In the end I believe you don’t deserve anything; you get what you get.”

-Elisa Gabbert, “Why Write?” The Paris Review. July 6, 2022

A number of nice nuggets in this piece. The second paragraph reminded me of that scene from The Unforgiven.

Write Until There Is Nothing Wrong With It

~ cafebedouin

“The process of imbuing every sentence with “minimum elegance and euphony,” [Amis] says in the clip above (drawn from a longer interview viewable here) involves “saying the sentence, subvocalizing it in your head until there’s nothing wrong with it. This means not repeating in the same sentence suffixes and prefix. If you’ve got a confound, you can’t have a conform. If you’ve got invitation, you can’t have execution. You can’t repeat those, or an –ing, or a –ness: all that has to be one per sentence. I think the prose will give a sort of pleasure without you being able to tell why.”

—Colin Marshall, “Martin Amis Explains His Method for Writing Great Sentences.” OpenCulture.com. June 24, 2020

We’re at Peak Newsletter, and I Feel Fine | Vanity Fair

~ cafebedouin

“‘No one needs more shit to read,’ wrote Erica Buist in a widely circulated Medium post entitled ‘The Personal Newsletter Fad Needs to End,’ citing Twitter, print magazines, and her nightstand book stack as competing entities.

It’s true that my Pocket app, Chrome tabs, bookshelves, and feeds are all crammed with reading material. Yet somehow I never begrudge a new newsletter landing in my inbox.”

—Claire Landsbaum, “We’re at Peak Newsletter, and I Feel Fine.” Vanity Fair. July 11, 2019

Even if you aren’t looking for another newsletter to subscribe to, you are bound to find something of interest in this article, such as the How to Stay Married Forever edition of Ask Molly.

Who Cares About The Great American Novel?

~ cafebedouin ~ 1 Comment

“A question from the New York Times’ Bookends, “Where is the great American novel by a woman?,” got an interesting answer from the Pakistani novelist Mohsin Hamid…

[Ursula’s answer, in short:]

But there’s something coy and coercive about the question itself that made me want to charge into the bullring, head down and horns forward. I’d answer it with a question: Where is the great American novel by anybody? And I’d answer that: Who cares?…

…Art is not a horse race. Literature is not the Olympics. The hell with The Great American Novel. We have all the great novels we need right now—and right now some man or woman is writing a new one we won’t know we needed till we read it.”

—Ursula K. Le Guin, “Who Cares About The Great American Novel?” Literary Hub. December 6, 2017.

Love Ursula.