Three drafts of the opening to John Updike’s novel “Rabbit at Rest.”
via New York Times
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Writers We Love
Annie Proulx
“Spend some time living before you start writing. What I find to be very bad advice is the snappy little sentence, “Write what you know.” It is the most tiresome and stupid advice that could possibly be given. If we write simply about what we know we never grow. We don't develop any facility for languages, or an interest in others, or a desire to travel and explore and face experience head-on. We just coil tighter and tighter into our boring little selves. What one should write about is what interests one.” –Annie Proulx in The Atlantic, November 1997
via MAD’s Monday Muse | Experience, Learn & Grow.
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“Vladimir Nabokov referred to editors as ‘pompous avuncular brutes.’ T.S. Eliot said that many of them were just “failed writers.” And Kingsley Amis, that laureate of cantankerousness, spoke of how the worst kind
prowls through your copy like an overzealous gardener with a pruning hook, on the watch for any phrase he senses you were rather pleased with, preferably one that also clinches your argument and if possible is essential to the general drift of the surrounding passage.
Raymond Carver, at least to begin with, was on altogether better terms with his editor, Gordon Lish, to whom he once wrote, ‘If I have any standing or reputation or credibility in the world, I owe it to you.’”
via The Two Raymond Carvers | The New York Review of Books
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“Did Agatha Christie, who wrote several dozen mystery novels during her 53-year career, suffer from Alzheimer’s-related dementia?”
via NYTimes.com
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Mary Ann de Stefano
