Tag: Salman Rushdie

Writer’s Desk: Deflect and Keep Moving

On By chrisbarsantiIn Books, Writing1 Comment

When interviewed by LitHub, novelist Hari Kunzru — who was one of many authors reading at the “Stand with Salman” event this past Friday on the steps of New York’s Public Library — was asked how he gets around writer’s block. His first response is what many writers say (in essence get over it):

The thing with writer’s block is that it only exists if you make it a problem. If you want to write something, you write it. If you “can’t,” it’s usually because subconsciously you don’t actually want to…

But then Kunzru gets to the heart of the matter, which is what to do when you really can’t figure out a way to move forward:

If I sit down at my desk and find I can’t generate new text, I try to do the next most useful thing: revise something, make notes for another section, work on some other piece of writing, write administrative email etc. If I’m really not able to concentrate I go for a bike ride or clean the house. Soon enough I can get back to what I was “supposed” to be doing. I’ve worked as a writer since I was in my early twenties, and I have rarely had any other source of income, so the idea that if I don’t write, I don’t eat is very deeply engrained. It’s a good motivator. In a certain sense, I’ve never really had the luxury of getting blocked…

Maybe you can’t write the next paragraph of your novel. But you can do something. Forward movement is crucial.

Writer’s Corner: Dreaming on Paper

On By chrisbarsantiIn Books, WritingLeave a comment

satanicverses1Last November, Salman Rushdie gave a talk at Dartmouth about magic realism, among other things. As part of the talk, he provided an important caveat to the well-worn “write what you know” dictum: “… if what you know is interesting.”

Rushdie elaborated:

Write what you don’t know. One way to do this is to leave home and go find a good story somewhere else. The other solution is to remember that fiction is fictionable and try to make things up. We’re all dreaming creatures. Dream on paper…

Reader’s Corner: Authorial Garbage

On By chrisbarsantiIn BooksLeave a comment

kenlopezFor writers who are looking for another reason why they never ever need to clean up after themselves, now they have something to work with besides: “I just need to polish this chapter.” The success of literary estate bloodhounds like Ken Lopez has proven the strange marketability of all kinds of marginalia (especially “interesting paper piles”) that nobody would ever have thought made sense to hang on to. Norman Mailer sold over a thousand boxes of his odds and ends in 2005 for $2.5 million.

Also, according to the Wall Street Journal, sometimes the buyers of this margnalia (university libraries, normally) can help function as a kind of executive assistant:

In 2006, for an undisclosed amount, Salman Rushdie sold [Emory University] 200 “falling apart, crappy cardboard boxes,” as he said at the collection’s opening in 2010. After Emory’s archivists put his “mess” in order, Mr. Rushdie capitalized on their tidiness to research his own 2012 memoir.

All authors need now to ensure that their various scribblings, laundry lists, and whatnot will fetch a pretty price in the future is to become wildly beloved by critics and preferably sell a million or so copies of their work in order to achieve a profitable literary immortality. Cake.