Authors Advise How To Write A Great Novel

This was a wonderful read in Friday’s Wall Street Journal, and as such I think others who enjoy books, and writing will find this equally interesting.  I offer small snippets from a longer, and very rewarding article.  While reading this my mind thought of Madison writer Emily Mills who has self-published.  (I still envy her for that.)

John Irving describes how he begins his novels by writing the last sentence first.

Before she begins a novel, Edwidge Danticat creates a collage on a bulletin board in her office, tacking up photos she’s taken on trips to her native Haiti and images she clips from magazines ranging from Essence to National Geographic.

Turkish novelist and Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk often rewrites the first line of his novels 50 or 100 times.

British novelist Hilary Mantel likes to write first thing in the morning, before she has uttered a word or had a sip of coffee. She usually jots down ideas and notes about her dreams. “I get very jangled if I can’t do it,” she says.

Booker-prize winner Michael Ondaatje’s preferred medium is 8½-by-11-inch Muji brand lined notebooks. He completes the first three or four drafts by hand, sometimes literally cutting and pasting passages and whole chapters with scissors and tape. Some of his notebooks have pages with four layers underneath.

Richard Powers lounges in bed all day and speaks his novels aloud to a laptop computer with voice-recognition software. Junot Diaz, author of the Pulitzer-prize winning novel “The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao,” shuts himself in the bathroom and perches on the edge of the tub with his notebook when he’s tackling a knotty passage. Hilary Mantel, whose Tudor drama “Wolf Hall” claimed this year’s Man Booker Prize, jumps in the shower when she gets stuck. “The number of pages I’ve got that are water marked, I can’t tell you,” Ms. Mantel said.

Behind the scenes, many of these writers say they struggle with the daily work of writing, clocking thousands of solitary hours staring at blank pages and computer screens. Most agree on common hurdles: procrastination, writer’s block, the terror of failure that looms over a new project and the attention-sucking power of the Internet.

A few authors bristle when asked the inevitable question about how they write. Richard Ford declined to reveal his habits, explaining in an email that “those are the kind of questions I hope no one asks me after readings and lectures.” Others revel in spilling minute details, down to their preferred brand of pen (Amitav Ghosh swears by black ink Pelikan pens) or font size (Anne Rice uses 14-point Courier; National Book Award nominee Colum McCann sometimes uses eight-point Times New Roman, forcing himself to squint at the tiny type). Some now offer fans a window into the process, reporting on their progress on blogs and Twitter feeds.