Maintaining Confidence

For those of you who write, there's a great piece on Forbes.com (found via BookRabbit on Twitter) about how successful writers maintain their confidence. Alan Rinzler, Executive Editor at Jossey-Bass (an imprint of John Wiley) points out that :

To write well requires energy, discipline and a sense of humor.

And he offers some sterling advice to writers to help them soldier on through periods of doubt, - among them :

Even if you don’t love what you’re turning out, keep putting those words on the screen or down on paper, regardless. What may feel like a massive writer’s block may be only the need to pause, or to work out the story on an internal, unconscious level. You can always polish or delete what you’ve written, but sustaining the discipline will be encouraging and ultimately valuable. You will actually build confidence by sticking to the task at hand.

Second Novel Syndrome

With Tash launching his second novel and a number of others working on theirs, it's timely to ask whether the second novel harder to write than the first?

Definitely yes.

With the news that The Time Traveller's Wife author Audrey Niffeneger getting a US$5 million deal for her second novel, Luke Leitch looks at the pressure successful authors are under to complete their second novels.

The Times also has a list of authors (including Harper Lee, Margaret Mitchell, Anna Sewell and Arundhati Roy) who found it so hard to write a second novel ... that it never happened. (I also blogged about this here.)

And there were, of course, the second novels which did nowhere as well as the first.

But then, by way of compensation, there were the second novels which were truly great ... including James Joyce's Ulysses, Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie, and Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice.

Jasper Rees in The Telegraph also writes about the dreaded second novel syndrome. He quotes Stephen Fry's theory about second novel syndrome :

The problem with a second novel is that it takes almost no time to write compared with a first novel. ... If I write my first novel in a month at the age of 23, and my second novel takes me two years, which have I written more quickly? The second of course. ...The first took 23 years, and contains all the experience, pain, stored-up artistry, anger, love, hope, comic invention and despair of that lifetime. The second is an act of professional writing. That is why it is so much more difficult.

But as Malcolm Know writes in The Sydney Morning Herald :

... true SNS can only exist where the first novel has been hugely successful. All writers know that if you haven't had a big bestseller, it's harder to get published next time, no matter what you write; and if you have had a big bestseller, you will be published, no matter what you write. There's a catch both ways.

The difficulties are not just about writing the book, they are also about promoting it. Jan Dalley, literary editor of The Financial Times and a judge of the Encore Award for Second Novels says:

The second novel is well known to be much more difficult ... Even those who have had success with their first novels - sometimes especially those who have - find second novels very hard. Nobody is interested in them any more as brilliant young things. They are now launched on their careers and they've just got to get on with it.

Dally also thinks :

Relative neglect of the second novel is a consequence of the overpraising of first novels, and it's partly because of the cult of the author in our press ... Far more attention is paid to authors than to their work. That is catching serious writers in a bad trap.

Whatever the reasons, the second novel tends not to be an easy ride, so our thoughts are with our friends who attempt this particular high-wire act in the public eye.

The Curse of Writer's Block

... when creative blockage sets in, the blank page before you grows to the size of a tablecloth. The grey laptop screen seems to hum with malignity. You feel you have nothing of interest or amusement to impart to the world. Words refuse to shift – as they always have done hitherto – from the vast lexicon in your memory to the sentences half-forming in your brain. You can't for the life of you remember why your character X has fetched up in a Wyoming mining town when, according to the plot, she should be falling in love with her tutor in Cambridge. You have not the faintest clue how to begin the next chapter.

John Walsh explores the phenomena known as "writer's block" in the Independent today, following British poet laureate Andrew Motion's admission yesterday that his own words dried up.

Along the way he finds that :

Some of the history's most famous, and prodigiously fluent, authors suffered temporary cessations of text: Leo Tolstoy, Virginia Woolf, Ernest Hemingway, Joseph Conrad, Katherine Mansfield.

Perhaps Joseph Roth's story is the most remarkable :

(His) Depression-era novel, Call It Sleep, was written in 1934. Roth tried a second novel without success, and gave up writing to work as a firefighter,
teacher and labourer. After his book was rediscovered by readers in the 1960s,
he resumed writing and, at 73, began a series of novels called Mercy Of A Rude
Stream. The first, A Star Shines Over Morris Park, came out in 1994, an amazing 60 years after its predecessor.

There are of course those authors who deny that there is such a thing, and I must say I like Will Self's attitude :

I have never experienced writer's block. Writing is a muscular action and, like any other, all you need to do is exercise the muscles. I don't even think of it as writing – it's typing.

Writing The World

A novelist writes about another novelist who is writing two novels about two other novelists, one writing novels to tell lies, the other to search for truth. In the 42 novels about 42 novelists they write, there are some novelists completely unaware of the lies they tell or deliberately telling lies or some that look for truth knowing pretty well they won’t find it or some skeptical about the truth they find. And those 47 novelists write 560 novels describing 1,585 novelists, and among those 1,585 novelists, while some novelists behave childishly even after having grown old in dozens of novels, others (some of them women) hang on to some ideals because of their Western education, and, despite marriage and family worries, become social reformers in about 60 novels, yet others rebel for reasons of their ideals or nation or selfishness and start a revolution against poverty and inequality in 920 novels, and only one novelist, leaving his home and family and traveling around the country, fights for the freedom of his nation and writes a beautiful novel about another novelist who, like himself, leaving his home and family to travel around the country, fights for the freedom of his nation, and finally gets killed. The main character of another novel about another novelist, a person from the same town as that of the dead novelist, suffers from loneliness even while stressing the need for subjectivity, forgets the very existence of the dead novelist and writes a novel about 2,088 novelists who in turn write 5,831 novels narrating the eternal plight of society’s oppressed peoples and 3,216 novels depicting the interior landscape of women. In 9,057 novels those 2,088 novelists write there appear 13,702 novelists whose 20,829 novels tell the story of only one novelist who, although he tries to write a single novel about one other novelist, fails to complete that novel, meets the other novelist and, to kill him, boils down all the novelists, including himself, numbering 13,701, 9,057, 2,088, 1,585, 47, 2, 1, and finally becomes the single novelist known as the novelist of all novelists.

I heard Christopher Merrill, Director of the The University of Iowa's International Writing Program, read this great piece at the Ubud Writers' and Readers festival back in September. It was written by Indian writer S. Diwakar, and translated by him and Merrill from the origianl Kannada.

I am actually as pleased as punch to find the text of the whole inspiring talk Merrill gave at Ubud on the Words Without Borders website. He talks about the power of bringing writers from all over the world together.

Quiz question of the day - who these writers mentioned in his essay?:

A British novelist and a Malaysian poet share a passion for puppets.

And what project came out of the friendship? The answer is actually way back on this blog. I just want to see if you are paying attention! (Okay, I'll buy the winner lunch.)

Sadly, I missed part of Merrill's talk at Ubud (which always involves making tough choices between one session and another), but his book about his spiritual journey Things of the Hidden God: Journey to the Holy Mountain sounds very much like one I'd like to read.

The q&a at the end of the session raised some evergreen questions about the writing process.

He was asked about whether writers block actually exists and replied by saying:

Why doesn't anyone ever ask if electricians have electricians' block?

And he quoted another writer (and I didn't get down the name of the guy who said this first - sorry!) :

Any poet can write a poem on any day of the week if your standards are as low as mine.

In other words, what matters is not that you wrote something good, but that you actually wrote something!

And of course he was asked whether creative writing can be taught. You can't teach genius, he replied, but then went on to describe how even the great short story writer, Flannery O'Connor, had to learn her craft at the University of Iowa.

No-one has any doubt you can teach art, sculpture, figure-skating. So why should there be any doubt that creative writing can be taught?

Writers Who Can't ... Or Won't

Catherine Keenan, the new literary editor of the Sydney Morning Herald, looks at why some of the best fiction writers simply ... stop writing.

There are those writers who appear to have been crippled by early success, she says:

Truman Capote's novel In Cold Blood was enormously successful in America but he never published another book after it.

Harper Lee "made the greatest literary debut of all time" with To Kill a Mockingbird: she won the Pulitzer and sold more than 10 million copies but since then has produced only three magazine articles.

F.Scott Fitzgerald "became an alcoholic wash-up" after The Great Gatsby.

J.D. Salinger never followed up The Catcher in the Rye.

And says Keenan, there are those writers who are paralysed by a lack of success:

Herman Melville wrote very little after Moby Dick bombed, commercially and critically.

Barbara Pym gave up writing entirely after her novels were rejected and moved to the country with her cat. (In 1980 she received more nominations for the most underated novelist of the century than any other writer).

Then there are the writers who enjoy a period of success and then just give up.

Back in January, the great Gabriel Garcia Marquez announced that he was giving up writing because his heart just wasn't in it anymore.

E.M. Forster wrote five successful novels, and then at 35 what is arguably his greatest book A Passage to India. And then he stopped writing fiction altogether, though he lived on for another 46 years!

Arundhati Roy won the Booker Prize with her first novel, The God of Small Things, "but since then she simply seems to have found better things to do than write fiction, and has become a vociferous activist in India".

It's almost taboo to say it, but perhaps writers just run out of things to say? Some keep going past that point, relying on reputation. Others accept the fact gracefully and move on to concentrate on ther areas of their lives.

I was intrigued to learn from Keenan that the term "writer's block" dates back only to the 1950's and has no direct translation in French or German!

Yet the concept has been around for some time. Writers, like other artists, have probably always struggled with their work, but the notion that an inability to write might be a specific affliction dates back to the romantic period when the whole notion of writing changed. Before then, it was understood to be the product of effort and discipline, much like tanning hides or embroidery. The romantics, however, recast it as a gift bestowed in moments of inspiration, which had the corollary effect of making the writer less an agent and more a receptacle of a kind of divine grace. The failure to write thus became strangely externalised and largely beyond a writer's control. Before then, he or she simply wasn't working hard enough.

Picture credit: literaryagent.co.uk

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see Index: On the Craft of Writing