Monologue to the Maestro | Esquire | OCTOBER 1935
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Monologue to the Maestro | Esquire | OCTOBER 1935
On writing about what you know, via Robert Pirsig (1974 interview):
... See moreWrite about what you know. And he said, if you write about what you know and you do it carefully and sincerely and make sure it's really what you know, that'll be plenty exotic to everybody else in this book. I've really tried to do that, and I've tried to justify what I've done to
How, then, to proceed? Skipping over, for the moment, the first draft, assuming some existing text to work with, my method is this: I imagine a meter mounted in my forehead, with a P on this side (“Positive”) and an N on that side (“Negative”). I try to read what I’ve written the way a first-time reader might (“without hope and without despair”). W
... See moreGeorge Saunders • A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life
Mais bon Dieu, Marcus, qu’est-ce que vous voulez écrire si ce n’est pas un roman ? Je répondis sans même réfléchir : — Un chef-d’œuvre ! Je veux écrire un chef-d’œuvre ! — Un chef-d’œuvre ? — Oui. Je veux écrire un grand roman, avec de grandes idées ! Je veux écrire un livre qui marquera les esprits. Harry me contempla un instant et éclata de rire
... See moreJoël Dicker • La Vérité sur l'Affaire Harry Quebert (French Edition)
I’ll sometimes ask the workshop to come up with what I call the “Hollywood version” of the story—a pithy one- or two-sentence summary. It’s no good to start making suggestions about a story until we’ve agreed on what it’s trying to do. (If a complicated machine showed up in your yard, you wouldn’t start altering it and “improving” it until you had
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