{"id":7585,"date":"2012-09-14T04:08:23","date_gmt":"2012-09-14T08:08:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/?p=7585"},"modified":"2012-09-14T04:08:23","modified_gmt":"2012-09-14T08:08:23","slug":"books-come-out-of-a-mixture-of-ambition-and-anxiety","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/2012\/09\/14\/books-come-out-of-a-mixture-of-ambition-and-anxiety\/","title":{"rendered":"&#8220;Books come out of a mixture of ambition and anxiety&#8221;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Martin Amis was interviewed in <a href=\"http:\/\/www.publishersweekly.com\/pw\/by-topic\/authors\/profiles\/article\/53046-anxiety-needed-martin-amis.html\">the July 2nd issue of <em>Publishers Weekly<\/em><\/a> (as you can see, I&#8217;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:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><em>Lionel Asbo<\/em> took Amis a year to write and a year to revise. \u201cI\u2019ve never spent that long revising before,\u201d he says. \u201cA writer friend asked me, \u2018What did you put in that wasn\u2019t there in the first draft?\u2019 My answer was \u2018anxiety,\u2019 there wasn\u2019t enough anxiety in it. Books come out of a mixture of ambition and anxiety, and the anxiety has to match the ambition, that\u2019s just how it works.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>I don&#8217;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&#8217;s right with the universe.<\/p>\n<p>But then, that&#8217;s just me. Who knows? Maybe anxiety is what&#8217;s been missing from my writing all along.<\/p>\n<p>What do you think? Do I need to become a little (or a lot) more anxious to become a better writer?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Martin Amis was interviewed in the July 2nd issue of Publishers Weekly (as you can see, I&#8217;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 [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[234,26,75],"class_list":["post-7585","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-martin-amis","tag-publishers-weekly","tag-quotes"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7585","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7585"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7585\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7585"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7585"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7585"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}