I like John Updike a lot. I think he's one of the best of his generation and superior to many of his famous peers. This is a great interview he gave back in the day. It's very soothing. He talks about rewriting, audiences, editors, etc. Lots of great, honest quotes. "Sometimes the writing you do when you're feeling flat isn't so bad, and the writing you do when you're feeling hot isn't so good." . . . What does it take to be a good novel writer, and is there any one thing? "It's a variety of things, clearly. I think one of them is a certain ability to organize. Since a novel should leave us with the sense of a completed thing. And so just the ability to see from word-1 to word-100,000 is some of it. "I think the most important gift a writer of fiction can have is a love of life, to be honestly interested in most things. If you write a novel you become aware of all the things you should know and all the things you do know. A certain generalized interest in the world is one of the ingredients that goes into being a novelist. A certain ability to see the other guy's, the other woman's, somebody else's side of things." So he puts empathy first . . . Anyway, it's nice to hear an S-Tier writer speak openly about the process.
I have experienced this! Last year I wrote this chapter. The words where pouring out like a waterfall and I stayed up until five in the morning, feeling so inspired and quite frankly full of it. A year later, I looked at it and deleted everything.
I've done the same. You think you're "in the zone" and then everything falls apart. It's interesting to hear a master admit that he doesn't always write at 100%. It makes the rest of us feel less tormented.
Actually, the real question is... who hasn't experienced this ? Writing is just way too hard. I always find the challenges famous writers face interesting too, I often look up how they started, how they progressed, etc. But it makes sense. All of us are just human at the end of the day.
