There's no reason you should write any novel quickly.
From John Irving
When I was still in prep school - 14, 15 - I started keeping notebooks, journals. I started writing, almost like landscape drawing or life drawing. I never kept a diary, I never wrote about my day and what happened to me, but I described things.
When I feel like being a director, I write a novel.
I do know where I'm going and it's just a matter of finding the language to get there.
When I love a novel I've read, I want to reread it - in part, to see how it was constructed.
I believe in rules of behavior, and I'm quite interested in stories about the consequences of breaking those rules.
One of the humbling things about having written more than one novel is the sense that every time you begin, that new empty page does not know who you are.
With every book, you go back to school. You become a student. You become an investigative reporter. You spend a little time learning what it's like to live in someone else's shoes.
I find screenplays easy to write, my novels being very visual. You see what people look like. The physical action is described.
I had been a student in Vienna, and one of the neat little things I had found out was about that zoo. It was a good debut novel for me to have published. I was 26 or 27 when it was published. I already had a kid and would soon have a second.
3 perspectives
2 perspectives
1 perspectives