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Description
I HAVE BEEN LEARNING to write for something like forty-five years. I say "learning to write' because writers never cease to learn their craft, and with each small extra discovery, even at my advanced age, the excitement of one's first fatal step is rekindled. And should the excitement ever die it will be time to quit writing. Rainer Maria Rilke put it more beautifully than I can:
Ah! But verses amount to so little when one begins to write them young. One ought to wait and gather sense and sweetness a whole life long, and a long life if possible, and then, quite at the end, one might perhaps be able to write ten good lines.
Most of us, of course, are driven by our demons to produce a good many more lines than that. And in a world run more and more by teams--even in the arts-the work of the novelist remains totally isolated, and with very little response from the world outside until the book's publication. Even then response can be minireal--and the one reward you have is a good review or the sort of reader who tells you they understood you, and that your work meant something to them. This makes an award such as the Miles Franklin... |
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