Saturday, September 25, 2010

Jonathan Franzen on Starting His Recent Novel


How do I start off a blog--an absolutely new blog that is likely to only be read by me--and keep it original and interesting? Perhaps the same way I did my other blog--by quoting a big name. In this case, the big name is Jonathan Franzen.

Recently, Franzen linked becoming recognized and accepted as signaling the end of his career in a recent guardian article.

His honesty aside, I find I have something in common with Franzen when it comes to writing novels:
More than a year later, when he finally felt ready to try his hand at fiction again, he began an agonising trawl for new material. He leaps up from his chair and opens the desk drawer to reveal a pile of what must be at least 1,000 pages of typed manuscript. "All false starts," he says with a strained smile. "It was so pathetic. Notes going round and round in circles. Days spent asking questions about certain characters in certain situations, trying to work out chronologies, logic trees burnishing off into infinity. Horrible, unreadable, intensely boring stuff."
What a horrible, unreadable, and intensely boring first blog post.

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