Margaret Atwood, Anne Rice, Kazuo Ishiguro And Others Share Their Writing Tips

Wall Street Journal:

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.

Read the whole story: Wall Street Journal

Comments

[Tulka2]

Magic. It's all magic.

[Soundofthunder]

I tend to throw much of what I write out, because it's just a gateway to what eventually is the story. For my second book, I wrote 100,000 before I happed upon a viable idea. Those 100,000 shall remain in the reject pile forever. The idea for my third novel was the culmination of frustration writing something I'd plotted (as an experiment) and grown bored with. Plotting, to me, is useless. I start with an idea, write, and let a plot happen. The funny thing is I could NEVER have plotted ahead of time what I eventually conceived. That's the pitfall of plotting: you get a plot, not a book, and any book worth a darn is far more than the sum of its plot points.

S

[PennP]

HuffPo, I read the entire piece a few days ago, and it's a wonderful look into the idiosyncracies of writers pursuing their craft. It's about how they overcome their own inertia and blocks to keep words flowing from mind to paper or screen. The sheer diversity is inspiring, but it would be more accurately characterized as the secrets to continued productivity, not the secrets to writing well.