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Thursday 10 January 2019

The Write Advice 116: DAVID MITCHELL


Words like inspiration and creativity I’m really rather suspicious of, though I can’t talk about my work for more than thirty seconds without deploying them myself.  Sometimes I think that creativity is a matter of seeing, or stumbling over, unobvious similarities between things — like composing a fresh metaphor, but on a more complex scale.  One night in Hiroshima it occurred to me that the moon behind a certain cloud formation looked very like a painkiller dissolving in a glass of water.  I didn’t work toward that simile, it was simply there: I was mugged, as it were, by the similarity between these two very different things.  Literary composition can be a similar process.  The writer’s real world and the writer’s fictional world are compared, and these comparisons turned into text.  But other times literary composition can be a plain old slog, and nothing to do with zones or inspiration.  It’s world making and the peopling of those worlds, complete with time lines and heartache.


The Art of Fiction #204 [The Paris Review #193, Summer 2010]


 

Use the link below to visit the website of British novelist DAVID MITCHELL:

 

https://www.davidmitchellbooks.com/

 

 

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The Write Advice 077: ELIZABETH JANE HOWARD

 
The Write Advice 066: LAURIE GRAHAM

 
The Write Advice 055: JULIAN BARNES

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