'Scar Tissue' is the only book I've ever written when I've felt completely toxic, ill.
People don't understand how hard it is to get recognized, how hard it is to get people to read your books. How hard it is to get people to even to understand what they're reading when they're talking to you about their books.
Writing a book is hard. It turns out, writing a second book is twice as hard.
I wrote 'Time Stops at Shamli' in 1956, shortly after 'The Room on the Roof' was published, and I couldn't find anyone to publish it.
In 2004, I took a one year sabbatical to finish my second novel, A Thousand Splendid Suns. At the end of that year, I was not done with my book, and had to in effect resign from work. I did. I never went back.
It is so much hard work writing your first novel. You're not even sure that it is possible to do.
The requests for blurbs seem to come in waves. I'm not sure what precipitates them. I think it must be excruciating for editors to draft those elaborate letters asking for a blurb, and I know it's torturous for us writers to ask directly. But publishers encourage us to. Rock and a hard place.
I write slowly by hand. Publishing is effectively bankrupt for you unless you are Danielle Steele. It takes a year to write book and advances are going down or disappearing.
Fiction is risky for writers also in that the process of making certain books, of shaping certain narratives, leaves scars and marks on your inner life.
I'm terrible at story and structure, but I'm not so bad at writing dialogue.
Every couple of years when your book comes out then you have to go into these fights with the publisher and the publicist and then maybe I bring sort of my knowledge of power into play.
When I started writing, the deal was that publishers gave you a grand or two as an advance to buy some sweets, with the promise that they would make a big putsch with your fourth book when you'd built up a bit of a following. But by the time my fourth book came out, previously unpublished authors were the new big thing.
I still have a full-time day job, which is why it took me five years to write An Ear to the Ground, and why I won't have another book finished by next week.
The grand surprise has really been the fact that being an author, which to me had always implied being a private person, actually requires you to be a public person as well, and those are two separate entities to me.
I have spent a great deal of my time defending my work against those who see it as too complicated, too old in approach, too bleak to qualify as children's literature. This has been the bane of my life.
That wasn't a bad price for a first book. My agent upped it as much as possible. I was 27 and had nothing behind me. I was working like a fool to earn a living and pay for my apartment.
I'm a failed poet. Maybe every novelist wants to write poetry first, finds he can't, and then tries the short story, which is the most demanding form after poetry. And, failing at that, only then does he take up novel writing.
Every single one of my books had its title changed almost as we were going to press, for all sorts of different reasons.
When I receive a box of my books, my impulse is to hide rather than display them. It always makes me very anxious that they send so many copies, because I have to think of lots of different places to hide them.
It's hard to do fiction and nonfiction simultaneously.
You know that thing people say, 'poetry is the hardest, stories are the second hardest, novels are the easiest?' I'm here to tell you that novels are the hardest. Writing a novel is unbelievably difficult. It's nightmarish.
I'm not the most prolific writer in the world, and, sadly, writing a novel involves a lot of effort.
Honestly, my sales pitch when I was a kid was, 'You don't want these Girl Scout cookies, do you?' If I had to push my own books, I'd stop writing. I hate the conflation of marketing and writing.
My first two books did nada. I ended up paying the publishers.
The real reason Milton went blind was to avoid reading unsolicited manuscripts.
