Yann Martel, the author of Life of Pi, shared some thoughts about writing with the AVClub section of the Onion newspaper:
“I am not a person who can write in paragraphs the way some writers can. To me, it’s sentence-by-sentence, sometimes word-by-word. And I revise constantly. It’s a very laborious process, but I love doing it. There’s nothing more satisfying than having a sentence fall into place in a way you feel is right, and then adding another one and then another one. It’s extraordinarily satisfying.”
In the same issue, a writer I’ve already quoted a few times here, Tom Perrotta (Little Children) said this about not having an outline and the danger of writing yourself into a corner:
“Yeah, that’s the danger of it. On the other hand, I knew very few writers who outline fully before they start. It just doesn’t seem possible to do, because so many things don’t come out until you’re absolutely knee-deep in the world. So it seems to me that all you need is enough to get going. And then you’ve got to trust the process, which is scary, because you don’t know where you’re going, and can make terrible mistakes.”
