As I'm in the opening throes of National Novel Writing Month, I, certainly, am not really writing the Great Novel. I'm thinking too fast and the grammar errors. Oh my!
That's not to say I can't write a great novel. You can, too! The Wall Street Journal asks top authors (like Junot Diaz and Nicholson Baker) how to write one.
From the piece...
Turkish novelist and Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk often rewrites the first line of his novels 50 or 100 times. "The hardest thing is always the first sentence—that is painful," says Mr. Pamuk, whose book, "The Museum of Innocence," a love story set in 1970s Istanbul, came out last month.
Mr. Pamuk writes by hand, in graph-paper notebooks, filling a page with prose and leaving the adjacent page blank for revisions, which he inserts with dialogue-like balloons. He sends his notebooks to a speed typist who returns them as typed manuscripts; then he marks the pages up and sends them back to be retyped. The cycle continues three or four times.
Mr. Pamuk says he writes anywhere inspiration strikes—on airplanes, in hotel rooms, on a park bench. He's not given to bursts of spontaneity, though, when it comes to plot and story structure. "I plan everything," Mr. Pamuk says.
Photograph by Doodlehead (found on Flickr).
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