If you’re struggling as you write your novel and you assume “real” writers have it much easier, Jane Hamilton, author of “The Book of Ruth,” is evidence that it ain’t necessarily so. She told a symposium recently that it took four complete versions of “Map of the World” before she got it right.
She said “Sometimes I can’t do the next thing until I finish the bad thing.”
She also revealed that conditions were far from ideal when she started writing. She was sharing a computer with her husband and bringing up young children. She said, “My early novels were fuelled with pure rage.”
Her books are about relationships, and she started her talk by quoting this wonderful passage from an essay by Willa Cather on Katherine Mansfield: “One realizes that human relationships are the tragic necessity of human life; that they can never be wholly satisfactory, that every ego is half the time greedily seeking them, and half the time pulling away from them.”
If we keep that in mind, we’ll never run out of stories!
Source: Salsburypost.com http://www.salisburypost.com/Entertainment/040112-book-hamilton-qanda-qcd
(Mark Twain has advice for you about writing. So do Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Anton Chekhov, and Jane Austen. You'll find it in "Your Creative Writing Masterclass," published by Nicholas Brealey and available from Amazon and other booksellers now.)
