The Write Advice 099: ANNE TYLER

The best part about being a writer is the experience of learning, gradually, what it is like to be a person completely different from me.  The hard part is that for years on end, I am working in a vacuum.  Is this a story anyone will believe? Anyone will care about?  I won’t know that until I’m finished… I would rather read the writer, not hear him or her talk.  I know that from being a writer myself: what I have to say, I have already said through my stories… I map my books out in a very cursory way — say, about a page for each novel — and I always think I know how they’ll end, but I’m almost always wrong.  In the case of The Accidental Tourist, I actually began a chapter in which Macon stayed with Sarah.  But it didn’t work; something in the characters themselves persuaded me the ending would have to be different.

A Conversation with Anne Tyler [2002]


 

Use the link below to read a 2015 interview with North American novelist ANNE TYLER:

 

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/feb/15/anne-tyler-interview-i-am-not-a-spiritual-person-spool-of-blue-thread

 

 

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Think About It 028: FRANK ZAPPA

Failure is one of those things that 'serious people' dread.  Invariably, the persons most likely to be crippled by this fear are people who have convinced themselves that they are so bitchen they shouldn't ever be placed in a situation where they might fail.
      Failure is nothing to get upset about.  It's a fairly normal condition; an inevitability in ninety-nine percent of all human undertakings.  Success is rare –– that's why people get so cranked about it.

The Real Frank Zappa Book [with Peter Occhiogrosso, 1989]


 

Use the link below to visit the website of North American musician, composer and astute social commentator FRANK ZAPPA (1940–1993):

 

http://www.zappa.com/

 

 

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