Writing fiction #

I have tried many times throughout my life, beginning from a very young age, to write fiction, and it has always been a dream of mine to write a novel.

Fiction is hard. It requires a very intense flow state for a meaningful amount of time, over and over again for many months to produce something interesting, and then a repeated editing effort to get what has been written into a finished state. There is a certain level to which this can be gamed: “just turning up” and sitting in a chair and forcing yourself to write, about something, but doing it for a meaningful amount of time and doing it constantly, can produce results that can potentially be edited into something. It’s an interesting exercise (NaNoWriMo is something I’ve always wanted to try, and have started twice).

  • This New Yorker piece on the morality of using other people’s lives in fiction.