The Write Advice 015: MARGARET DRABBLE

If it’s all right, it’s all right.  Sometimes whole paragraphs or pages come out absolutely fine, and they come out very fast, which I’m sure is how Dickens used to write, just very, very fast.  They’re fine and you don’t need to look at them.  But then there are other bits, where what you were trying to do hasn’t worked out or that sound clumsy.  And sometimes if you work and work and work at a passage, you realize in the end that there’s something deeply wrong with it, and you’d better just throw it away.

Quoted in The Sound on the Page by BEN YAGODA (2004)



Use the link below to read an excerpt of a 1978 interview with British novelist and critic MARGARET DRABBLE:

 

https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/3440/the-art-of-fiction-no-70-margaret-drabble 


 

 

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