I’ve started crying, which means the depths of despair might be headed my way. I’m trying not to think about it, so instead, am posting a little bit of inspiration from John Updike. I can’t remember which newsletter it came in last week, so apologies for the lack of proper credit:
“You imagine a reader and try to keep the reader interested. That’s storytelling. You also hope to reward the reader with a sense of a completed design, that somebody is in charge, and that while life is pointless, the book isn’t pointless. The author knows where he is going. That’s form. As to style, you find words that will deliver the image without stopping the action entirely. Writing ficiton is like music. You have to keep it moving. You can have slow movements but there has to be a sense of momentum, of going someplace. You hear a snatch of Beethoven and it has a sense of momentum that is unmistakably his. That’s a nice quality if you can do it in fiction.”
–John Updike in a Q&A with Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg in last weekend’s Wall Street Journal.