Tuesday, May 5, 2009

Now that's what I call writing: Michael Chabon

This is from Michael Chabon's novel Wonder Boys (essential reading for any writer). I think most writers can sympathize with this situation:

I had too much to write: too many fine and miserable buildings to construct and streets to name and clock towers to set chiming, too many characters to raise up from the dirt like flowers whose petals I peeled down to the intricate frail organs within, too many terrible genetic and fiduciary secrets to dig up and bury and dig up again, too many divorces to grant, heirs to disinherit, trysts to arrange, letters to misdirect into evil hands, innocent children to slay with rheumatic fever, women to leave unfulfilled and hopeless, men to drive to adultery and theft, fires to ignite at the hearts of ancient houses. It was about a single family and it stood, as of that morning, at two thousand six hundred and eleven pages, each of them revised and rewritten half a dozen times. And yet for all of those years, and all of those words expended in charting the eccentric paths of m characters through the violent blue heavens I had set them to cross, they had not even reached their zeniths. I was nowhere near the end.

Two thousand, six hundred and eleven pages? Yikes!

No comments:

Post a Comment