Today's Writers' Guild blog has an interesting piece about writing your second novel. It quotes Luke Leitch, writing in The Times:
First novels, goes the orthodoxy, are the fruits of years of thought shaped into words at the writer's leisure.
Stephen Fry explained this when presenting the Encore Award - a £10,000 biannual literary prize for second novels.
He said: "The problem with a second novel is that it takes almost no time to write compared with a first novel. If I write my first novel in a month at the age of 23, and my second novel takes me two years, which have I written more quickly? The second of course. The first took 23 years, and contains all the experience, pain, stored-up artistry, anger, love, hope, comic invention and despair of that lifetime. The second is an act of professional writing. That is why it is so much more difficult."
Tell me about it. :-\
Wednesday, March 18, 2009
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2 comments:
Don't despair - have a pear 8D!
Right, John. With no possibility of Arousal, it's time to move on.
I do wish I'd had time there to check out Wales properly, though. Maybe some other time.
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