Martin Amis was interviewed in the July 2nd issue of Publishers Weekly (as you can see, I’m way behind on that magazine) and had this to say about why he spent an unusually long time (well, for him, anyway) revising his latest novel:

Lionel Asbo took Amis a year to write and a year to revise. “I’ve never spent that long revising before,” he says. “A writer friend asked me, ‘What did you put in that wasn’t there in the first draft?’ My answer was ‘anxiety,’ there wasn’t enough anxiety in it. Books come out of a mixture of ambition and anxiety, and the anxiety has to match the ambition, that’s just how it works.”

I don’t know about you, but when I write, anxiety is far from my mind. When I write, I go to a place of peace, a space of almost spiritual contemplation. I am in that zone runners talk about, in which all the world falls away, and everything’s right with the universe.

But then, that’s just me. Who knows? Maybe anxiety is what’s been missing from my writing all along.

What do you think? Do I need to become a little (or a lot) more anxious to become a better writer?