It fascinates me how many different ways there are to think about writing.
Fellow #writers, do any of you resonate with these words by William Gass, in a 1976 interview in The Paris Review?
https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/3576/the-art-of-fiction-no-65-william-gass
If not (and I suspect it's "not" for most of you), what *would* you say motivates your work? Has it always been this way, or have your motivations changed over time?
Someone asked me a few weeks back what my favourite novels were. Then I had a Bad Time harassed on the street & forgot. 🙃 So many! How to choose?
Brothers K is one I feel too personally to rank; others include The Sea, The Sea; Light in August; Middlemarch; A Cure for Suicide; Golden Notebook; Anathem...
But for exquisite books? Top 3?
The Name of the Rose
The Years of Rice and Salt
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Books that seek wholehearted immersion will always win my heart.
Y tú? 👀
#Books
@MLClark Beautiful list(s). Brothers K and Middlemarch are right up there for me as well. For much of my life I think I *was* Dorothea. Can't believe I've never read The Name of the Rose...
@LiseL Ohhhh I knew we were bosom friends, as Anne would say. :)
Yes, Dorothea is someone I resonated with myself (to my horror!). The worst part is that, as a wee'un, I could ID all the people who would "Exactly right" me in ways I knew weren't genuine - but they aren't easily escaped! So how does one *not* try to lean into something that feels truer to that inner integrity burning for expression?
😅 Ah life. In that and Mill on the Floss, I think Eliot was writing characters true to her too.
@LiseL The Name of the Rose is such a thoroughly sincere effort to imagine the past as it would have been experienced by people at the time. There are few historical works that do quite as good a job of full, credulous immersion into another way of perceiving the world, but Nicola Griffith's Hild is certainly up there. (I just wish she'd resisted an anachronism: a quote by Atwood that doesn't belong in the era.) Another by her, Spear, just won the Bradbury Prize but I haven't read it yet.
@MLClark Sold. I'll read it this summer -- after I'm finished reading your novels, of course!