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?

Here, from playwright and actor Wallace Shawn, is a sentiment you might find … inconceivable.

When I think about my own case, I don’t think of writing as a professional skill. I think of it as an odd thing that I feel an impulse to do. You eat chocolate because you feel a desire to do it. You don’t develop a technique for doing it. You don’t get better at it. And I don’t want to think of writing as a skill I have that I habitually exercise according to a certain schedule of procedures. If it had to be that, I’d possibly feel that I’d rather not to it. Actually, I find the idea of writing as a professional skill somewhat sickening.

I’m not religious, but wouldn’t a religious person find something sickening about it if he were asked to think of meditation, prayer, or adoration of the universe as professionalized skills for which a method could be codified? I guess I am halfway between saying that writing is too personal, intimate, humiliating, and miniscule to discuss and saying it’s too sacred and vast to discuss. And I don’t like to think of it as a thing I do the same way again and again. Who says one instance of writing has anything in common with another instance?

(from an interview in The Paris Review #201)

Earlier this year, faced with some expiring miles from an airline I no longer fly, I exchanged them for a bunch of magazine and newspaper subscriptions. One of them was to The New York Observer, which I find so annoying I’m looking forward to my subscription lapsing so I’ll no longer have to suffer its whiny sense of entitlement.

It’s as if the go-go ’80s never went. Several times an issue I’m tempted to throw the magazine across the room and shout, “Die, yuppie scum!”

Surprisingly, the April 4th issue had a couple of quotes worth sharing, which I never expected. And to show I’m unafraid of exposing my ignorance, I’ll add that they’re both from writers I hadn’t heard of before. I’m assuming that when you hear their names, you’ll think, “Has this guy been living in a cave?” But I’m risking your disapproval anyway.

First, a review of Otherwise Known as the Human Condition by Geoff Dyer contains this quote from that author:

“As the ball hangs there, moon-white against the wall of cloud, everything in the world seems briefly up for grabs and I am seized by two contradictory feelings: There is so much beauty in the world it is incredible that we are ever miserable for a moment; there is so much shit in the world that it is incredible we are ever happy for a moment.”

I happen to be a “Life is a banquet and most poor bastards are starving to death” kind of guy, but still, I found the second half of that passage quite moving.

Later in the issue, Lynne Tillman is quoted in a review of her new short story collection Someday This Will Be Funny:

“I don’t want this backstory business,” Ms. Tillman said. The word “backstory” might as well have been “incest” coming from her mouth. “I just think that’s horrible. I mean, backstory? What are you talking about? So often in writing classes you hear students say to one another, ‘But I’d really like to know more about that character.’ And I have to restrain myself. That’s not the story. You don’t get to know everything about the character. You get to know what’s necessary.”

I couldn’t agree more. Not all questions need to be, or should be, answered. It’s said of performers, you should always leave them wanting more. It should be said of short stories, too.

Anyway, thanks for surprising me, Observer. I hope you can manage to do it again.