#article on writing

[allywritesstories]

Great article about the time it takes to write.

[soundthewindchimes]

There is so much good stuff in this interview. Writing, theater, characterization, storytelling. It's just gold.

[soundthewindchimes]

That’s the kind of a person it takes to be a writer: someone who’s zealous and ready to argue, someone who has Philip Roth tell him, “It’s torture, don’t do it,” and replies, “You had me at ‘torture.’ ” You don’t enter into it because it’s a great lifestyle decision—it isn’t—you do it because, for whatever reason, you believe in it, and you believe in it because, for whatever reason, you need to believe in it.

Avi Steinberg, "Is Writing Torture?" NY Times. 

[soundthewindchimes]

Would a plumber or an embroiderer or a programmer have any sympathy for what I’m talking about here? Maybe this is a writer thing, having pages and pages of stuff written that has not yet cohered into a completed arc, which, when you finish it, would be a laurel on which you could rest. And yet it’s a project that ends up shaming you. Its very existence says, if you can choose things to stake your ego on, of all the things you could choose, why one so massively unfinished? It would be easier to live without having ever started the project; it’s the sort of project that sucks the fun from the beach, because every wave marks another unit of time you’re not spending working on it. Let’s say you wake this project from its slumber on your computer to peek at it, and you think, God, that’s really good, let me squeeze in here and tinker for a few minutes. In which time you actually thump some sentences and shake the lint out of some phrases, and think, I should have her say this here. Thirty minutes of thumping and shaking later, you’re clawing at your throat going, Get me the fuck out of here, this is killing me, because it’s threatening to smother you—the insufficiency of your tinkering, and not only here. Your whole writing life, you realize, has not only been a series of drive-by tinkerings, which produces completed work of some value, oh, rarely, but has ruined other parts of your life.

Michael Erard, Giving Up the Guns