Each book is a new book

Michael Wood: Has writing fiction become easier for you over the years?

Paul Auster: No, I don’t think so. Each book is a new book. I’ve never written it before and I have to teach myself how to write it as I go along. The fact that I’ve written books in the past seems to play no part in it. I always feel like a beginner and I’m continually running into the same difficulties, the same blocks, the same despairs. You make so many mistakes as a writer, cross out so many bad sentences and ideas, discard so many worthless pages, that finally what you learn is how stupid you are. It’s a humbling occupation.

—interview

On early work that is just garbage (three!)

Jack Livings: All novelists seem to have at least one in the drawer that’s just garbage.

Salman Rushdie: I have three. Until I started writing Midnight’s Children, which would probably have been about late ’75, early ’76, there was this period of flailing about. It was more than a technical problem. Until you know who you are you can’t write. Because my life had been jumbled up between India and England and Pakistan, I really didn’t have a good handle on myself. As a result the writing was garbage—sometimes clever garbage, but garbage nonetheless.

—this Paris Review interview

On the novelistic delights of Atlas Shrugged; on unlikely sources of inspiration

“I didn’t recognize that [Atlas Shrugged] was a stupid novel. To me, it was just, you know, a novel, and I was reading it—the first book I’d read in years. It pulled me in with the old novelistic tricks—language and settings and people moving around and talking passionately and so forth.”

—George Saunders (x)

This is similar to the way I enjoyed Atlas Shrugged. (I feel lucky that I was somewhat inoculated against Ayn Rand’s Objectivism by my vague grasp of the dangers of capitalism, my awareness that civilization was at least partly a mistake, and my thinking about childhood psychology (Rand expresses no curiosity about what makes people who they are!).)

How strange, how poetically improbable, that Saunders of all people was inspired to write by this of all books.

On prioritizing parts of writing

“Prioritize words that deliver the most impact for the reader, rather than the ones that most closely adhere to your vision of the story.”

—T. R. Darling (x)

This is an interesting thought. If you’re really dedicated, you can articulate every detail of your story’s setting and events, but that will make a bad story because it will place equal emphasis on important and unimportant details.

I wonder if the teacher was simply unwilling to say “Kill your darlings” in front of an actual Darling.

Heh, I think this is true

“Bad reviews are the worst when they come with an element of shame: you know the reviewer is right, and you wish you could’ve fixed the problem.”

—Rahul Kanakia (x)

I don’t think this is always true but it’s very very often true

“The fundamental challenge for any amateur writer is knowing where to direct his reader’s focus, and every element of style serves this one and only sole directive: to draw the reader’s attention to the significant and away from the unnecessary. Thus bad writing is always bad for the same reason: it’s distracting.”

—the editors (?) of Hypnos Magazine (x)

Short story: “The Loved Dead”

“The Loved Dead,” by C. M. Eddy, Jr., revised by H. P. Lovecraft to an unknown extent (and it really reads like Lovecraft; he kind of sounds like the Gordon Lish to Eddy’s Raymond Carver)

According to Wikipedia, first written in 1919; published in Weird Tales 4, No. 2 (May–June–July 1924); reprinted in Arkham Sampler (Summer 1948); also in The Dark Brotherhood and Other Pieces (Arkham House, 1966); also in The Horror in the Museum and Other Revisions (Arkham House, 1970); also in The Loved Dead and Other Revisions (Carroll & Graf Publishers, 1997); also in The Loved Dead and Other Tales (Fenham Publishing, 2008); read terrifically by Andrew Leman in PseudoPod 685, January 17th, 2020; PDF here

3,939 words

Lovecraft at his best, Eddy at … well, I don’t know anything about Eddy, but nice work.

The details of the action are only roughly sketched out, and I think that’s one reason so many people call this kind of thing bad writing. After all, when we think of good writing, we think of a certain writerly conviction capable of painting every detail in lifelike vividity. This story lacks interest in realizing scenes and evoking precise sensory experiences (perhaps in part because explicitly fucking a rotting corpse was beyond the pale even for Weird Tales, at the time). And yet it does carry “absolute conviction,” as PseudoPod host Alasdair Stuart says, a different kind of conviction than we might expect: the assurance that all this melodramatic nonsense is true.

On the kind of writer’s block where you’re actually writing a lot, but it’s bad

“The typical advice is to ignore that self-critical feeling and keep writing, even though you suspect the work is really bad. This is not good advice. The problem is that the work usually is terrible. You’re accurately responding to its badness.

“So the real question isn’t ‘How do I feel better about my crappy work?’ it’s instead ‘How do I make work that I don’t need to feel better about?’

“Because while it’s true that all first drafts are bad, there’s a difference between ‘bad’ and ‘boring’. A first draft ought to contain the kernel of that thing that makes you excited about the book. You can see the part of this draft that is incredible and world-altering, even if right now that part is mostly obscured by all the cliche, trivial, or just-plain-weird stuff that you also threw into the draft.

“When the draft lacks even that element of greatness, you’re not gonna like it, and no matter how much you write or rewrite it, probably nobody else will either.”

—Naomi Kanakia (x)

Kanakia’s insight into writing (and, I suppose, art-making in general) always strikes me as remarkable. It’s so unlike what you hear elsewhere. I also find her attitude about writing quite fascinating. The mystic-like detachment! The lack of ego!

I’m very much in the minority on this, I know

I don’t quite like the first paragraph of The Haunting of Hill House (Shirley Jackson, Viking, 1959). It feels melodramatic to me. The rest of the book is so much more subtle and so damn good.

So many people have written praise for this paragraph. Benjamin Dreyer has written some wonderful commentary on it. But I don’t like the talk about sanity and insanity; I don’t like the doors being “sensibly shut” (why shouldn’t they be? I don’t like that sensibly, somehow); I’m not sure I like the image of silence lying steadily against anything (how could it, being immaterial?); I don’t like that dramatic “whatever walked there, walked alone” (although I agree with Dreyer that the comma makes for a good rhythm). I don’t even like the use of semicolons—too dramatic for me—although I adore semicolons generally.

I do like “larks and katydids,” and the idea that they dream.

Edited to add that I think the last bit is actually a rhyming Alexandrine couplet? Is that possible? Has no one else noticed this?

Me

“If I haven’t captured the emotional core of the book—the thing that makes it matter—then it starts to feel like it’s just words on a page. Sometimes those words are clever and sometimes they’re [not]. When they’re very clever, I can occasionally write 30 or 40,000 of them before I realize that there’s nothing beneath them.”

—Rahul Kanakia (x)