Aug 17, 2012
Writing a novel is at least as hard as learning how to play concert piano, Norman Mailer once said. And yet some part of us is fooled into thinking it ought to be easier than it is because the medium we're using is this language we have been speaking since childhood. If you want to write gracefully and with clarity about things that matter, and to make it seem as effortless as common speech, you are going to have to work as hard as you have ever worked on anything in your life. And that's why it takes years. If you're struggling it's because your talent is acting on it, seeing into it's fault lines, and you have to learn to trust the difficulty.
Richard Bausch