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 Writers on Writing: The Preparations One thing almost all our writers agreed on...writing is hard work. Here, some writers reveal that nothing good ever comes easy. 
"The process is often very frustrating. One can have a complete moraine of failure in
feeling that you're climbing a mountain, and you're falling back down again, or you're
trying swimming across a river and an undertow is taking you the wrong way."
— Joyce Carol Oates, We Were The Mulvaneys "I spent one year just defining the different voices, because I knew from the beginning that it would be five narratives that would be interspersed and I wanted you to be able to just ... open the book at any point and read a sentence and know who said it. The way I worked on that was to spend about a year in writing exercises and I would imagine a scene and then I would write the same scene from five different points of view." — Barbara Kingsolver, The Poisonwood Bible "I read a while ago that there are 7500 published writers in the country with books, and out of those only 200 make a living out of it. So it's almost a given that if you're going to be a writer you're also going to have to have one or two or three jobs. It could be a lot worse. It's a rich life, it's not boring." — Andre Dubus III, House of Sand and Fog 
"I was so naive when I started writing. I didn't know any better. I just thought, 'Sure I'll start a novel.
What a good idea!' I had no idea what I was in for. I had no idea that this might be a difficult thing to do."
— A. Manette Ansay, Vinegar Hill "I write between 50 and 100 revisions before I let anything go...it's getting to know the character deeper and deeper and deeper in each revision." — Ursula Hegi, Stones From The River "It's work. It's a small idea that becomes a bigger one, and then where is the language for it? It's one word at a time. One idea. It's constant revision. Trying to make it look inspired. Trying to make it appear effortless. Trying to make it appear comfortable and exciting and at the same time revelatory. And that for me is not a question of inspiration. It's a question of very, very hard, very sustained work." — Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon, Paradise, The Bluest Eye 
What authors have most inspired you?
More Writers on Writing |
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