American - Novelist | December 23, 1963 -
I just finished writing an essay about William Maxwell, an American writer whose work I admire very much.
Donna Tartt
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Actually, I enjoy the process of writing a big long novel.
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I've written only two novels, but they're both long ones, and they each took a decade to write.
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There's an expectation these days that novels - like any other consumer product - should be made on a production line, with one dropping from the conveyor belt every couple of years.
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But it's for every writer to decide his own pace, and the pace varies with the writer and the work.
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The Little Friend is a long book. It's also completely different from my first novel: different landscape, different characters, different use of language and diction, different approach to story.
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I'd rather write one good book than ten mediocre ones.
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Children have very sharp powers of observation - probably sharper than adults - yet at the same time their emotional reactions are murky and much more primitive.
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Storytelling and elegant style don't always go hand in hand.
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The storytelling gift is innate: one has it or one doesn't. But style is at least partly a learned thing: one refines it by looking and listening and reading and practice - by work.
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The books I loved in childhood - the first loves - I've read so often that I've internalized them in some really essential way: they are more inside me now than out.
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So I'm not a Southern writer in the commonly held sense of the term, like Faulkner or Eudora Welty, who took the South for their entire literary environment and subject matter.
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