what the writers say
Sunday afternoon at the Brooklyn Book Festival: At the Spoonbill and Sugartown booth, we spotted the project-turned-new-book Learning to Love You More by Miranda July and friends. We saw long lines of people wrapped around the block, trying to get into speaking events by Jonathan Lethem and Dave Eggers. We opted for the picturesque courtroom where we listened to a very brainy talk by writers Francine Prose, A.M. Homes, and Bomb editor Betsy Sussler.
Francine Prose made a really good point (well, there were many good points, but this one stuck with me most), that when she’s preparing a new piece of work she tends not to look at what others have already written on the topic, because then she’ll feel like whatever she wanted to do, people have already said and done.
And A.M. Homes, on the subject of coincidence and foresight, said laughing, “we don’t know what we know, you know.”
We should give ourselves more credit for what’s bottled up inside our heads, and just go ahead and express those things in our own voices.
True, that.
I’m glad to know that even successful authors sometimes feel that what they want to do has already been done.