martin amis on “the spooky art” of novel writing.
“Why did you decide to write a novel about the Holocaust?” This challenge, which I still sometimes hear, can only be answered as follows: “But I never did.” Similarly, I never decided to write a novel about teenage sexuality, or Thatcher’s England, or millennial London, or, indeed, about the Gulag (which I nonetheless completed in 2006). With its hopelessly inapposite verb, and presumptuous preposition, the question reveals an understandable naivety about the way that fictions are made. For the novel, as Norman Mailer put it, is “the spooky art”.
a great little article: read more
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