8th July 2016 | for Creatives | reading, creative process, writing, solitude of creating, writing groups, Dorthe Nors |
"Read everything but write on your own. And if you have a mentor, learn what you can then run like hell."
"I wish all writers realized that agents, publishers, book doctors, vanity presses, and how-to seminars, have a cost attached to them—sometimes a very high cost—with zero guarantees. You can be a writer, and have writer be a part of your identity, without any of them."
"Dubus frowns on writers' groups, believing they lead members astray from the work at hand. His father told him that a novelist is like a whale submerged in the ocean. You're down there alone, and you're supposed to be down there alone. 'It makes us face our own mortality,' he says. 'Working alone on a 300-to-400-page project for five years all by yourself brings you right to the starkness of coming into the world alone and leaving alone, as we all do.'"
"It is such a hard thing to write a book. It is incredibly hard. And it's a solitary, isolated thing to do. And writers need every ounce of support they can get."
"I try to write the first draft very quickly. I don't write the end. I don't write the last quarter. So I write my draft. And then ... my next draft is usually cleaning it up and seeing what's there: 'What do we have here?'"
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