Really, I have found the drink actually helps.” - Live at the NYPL with Sloane Crosley On Writing Being "Hostile" Because you don’t edit very dramatically when you’re - you’re not very hard on yourself, you’re not very loose with yourself most of the day. Marking up something is just another way of saying editing it. While you’ll just kind of be tense and not sure. And the drink loosens me up enough to actually mark it up, you know. And I mark it up and leave it until the morning, and then I make the corrections in the morning, which gives me a way to start the day. "Before I start to write, the night before - I mean, when I finish work at the end of the day, I go over the pages, the page that I’ve done that day, and I mark it up. 71, The Paris Review, 1978 On Revising (And Drinking) And by the time you've laid down the first two sentences, your options are all gone." - The Art of Fiction, No. Everything else is going to flow out of that sentence. "What's so hard about that first sentence is that you're stuck with it. In the book, she describes being unable to sleep the night before a piece was published, for fear of response, for fear of getting it right.įor those familiar with the difficult art of writing, let’s take a look at some of Didion’s best quotes on overcoming writer’s block, self-doubt, and more. Didion suffered from a lack of confidence when it came to writing - at times, her anxiety was so intense that it manifested in debilitating migraines, according to Daugherty. Though it might seem like Didion is a natural, even an “ sacred” writer who came out of the womb being praised and coddled, this isn't exactly the case. She took the book home and typed the first paragraph on a solid Olivetti Lettera 22 typewriter.” By the time she’d made it to Mademoiselle as their guest fiction editor when she was 21, her profile in their August issue read that her interests included “publishing a book of my own.” (She would indeed publish her first novel, Run River, in 1963.)īut even for Joan Didion, the ultimate “cool girl” of literary fame, writing was a struggle.
“She read the first paragraph of A Farewell to Arms. According to Tracy Daugherty’s new biography of the writer, The Last Love Song, Didion began keeping notebooks around the age of 6. From an early age, writing was always something Joan Didion knew she wanted to do. The most famous of Joan Didion’s quotes is probably “we tell ourselves stories in order to live,” which is from from The White Album.
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