the craft of writing is finding your emotional truth.
i recently read BEAUTIFUL RUINS by Jess Walter. what a book. one day, i hope i write a book that’s even a little bit as beautiful as this book.
in an essay included at the back end of the book, he talks about living and experiencing life, the necessity of time. then he talks about rewriting this book for 15 years. 15 years. he states he needed to live and grow as a person before he could finish the novel.
There are so many elements an author thinks about while writing everyday–big things like story and characters, language and voice, and small, technical things like point of view and verb tense–but one element I don’t think I’d considered before was…time. And now, time seemed like the most important piece of all.
I was thirty-one when I started this book, when Dee first got out of that boat and Pasquale sloshed over to meet her. I was forty-six when I finally finished it, when this old couple walked away once more in the hills above Cinque Terre.
here’s Jess in interview: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Knr70lHkNnw
i’ve got time. i really do. but i better get to work.
how are the re-writes going?