Book: A memoir of the craft

Not every book has to be filled with symbolism, irony or melodic language (after all, it's not called prose for nothing), but it seems to me that every book - at least those that are worth reading - should be about something.

Stories and novels are not souvenir T-shirts or wooden football players. These are relics, remnants of an undiscovered pre-existing world. The writer’s job is to use the tools in his toolbox to get them out of the ground, damaging them as little as possible. Sometimes the fossil is small, just a shell. Sometimes huge, a Tyrannosaurus rex with all its giant ribs and bared teeth. In any case - a short story or a thousand-page novel - the excavation technique is essentially the same.

... you cheated me once - shame on you. If you cheated me a second time, let me be ashamed. He cheated me a third time - let both of us be ashamed.

The job of a fiction writer is to find the inner truth in the woven web of a fictional story, not to sacrifice intellectual honesty in pursuit of dough.

What really matters about reading is that it creates ease and familiarity with the process of writing; a person comes to the writer’s country with all documents in perfect order. Constant reading will lead you to a place where (in a mood in which - if you prefer) you can write willingly and selflessly. And you are given an ever-increasing knowledge of what has been done and what has not yet been done, what is old and fresh, what works, and what is just lying on the page, dying (or already dying). The more you read, the less likely you are to make a fool of yourself using your own pen or word processor.

Does it make sense to build entire palaces out of words? I think there is, and readers of Margaret Mitchell’s “Gone with the Wind” and Dickens’ “Bleak House” will understand me; sometimes even a monster is not a monster at all. Sometimes it turns out beautifully, and the narrative grips us in a way that no film or television program could ever dream of. Even after a thousand pages, we do not want to leave the world created for us by the author, to part with the reliable people he created. And after two thousand pages, you don’t want it either, if there are two thousand of them. A great example of this is Tolkien’s “The Rings”. Thousands of pages about hobbits were not enough for three generations of post-war fantasy lovers, and even if you add the clumsy and unruly epilogue, “The Silmarillion,” it is still not enough.

... always, when I see the first novel dedicated to a wife (or husband), I smile and think: Here

Before Carrie, I wrote other novels - Fury, The Long Walk and The Running Man were later published. Of these, "Rage" is the most problematic, "The Long Walk" is the best. But none of them taught me what I learned from Carrie White. The most important thing is that the author's perception of a character can be just as erroneous as the reader's perception of him. The next thought is that quitting your job because it is emotionally or imaginatively difficult is not worth it. Sometimes you have to continue even if you really don’t want to, and sometimes good work happens even when it seems like you’re shoveling crap while sitting down.

I had to live many more years - too many, I think - ashamed of what I wrote. It seems that only when I was forty [years old] did I realize that almost every author of fiction who published at least a line in his life was accused by someone of wasting his God-given talent on nonsense. If you write (books, or paintings, or sculpt, or sing - it doesn’t matter), someone will definitely try to instill in you a feeling of shame for it. I'm not philosophizing - I'm just stating a fact.

Gould said something else that was interesting to me on the day of my first two notes: write with the door closed, rewrite with the door open. Your writing begins for yourself, in other words, but then it goes out into the world. When you understand what a thing is and do it right - at least as best you can - it belongs to everyone who wants to read it. Or criticize. If you are very lucky (this is my idea, but I think John Gould would have subscribed to it), there will be more of the former than the latter.

Let's clear something up right now, okay? There is no Landfill of Ideas, no Central Repository, no Island of Lost Bestsellers. Good story ideas literally come out of nowhere, falling straight out of the blue: two completely separate thoughts mesh together and something new emerges under the sun. Your job is not to look for these ideas, but to recognize them when they appear.

Lopuhnutsya happens to even the best of us. Talk about the architect of the "Iron" in new York, if he had committed suicide when he realized just before the ribbon cutting that he had forgotten in his skyscraper to arrange toilets. Maybe that's not true, but let's not forget that someone has designed the "Titanic" and declared it unsinkable.

The book of Norris caused strong public outrage, to which Norris coldly and calmly replied: "the hell do I in their opinion? I'm not just buttering me up. I'm telling the truth".

Each you taken in hands the book gives its own lesson or lessons, and very often a bad book can teach more than good.