★★★★☆ | Writing | Print | Own | Goodreads | StoryGraph
It took me months and months to finish this book, and I think that’s the right pace for something like this. This book can only be appreciated in print form. The pictures and notes would not work at all on Kindle. The challenge of the book is that it’s almost impossible for creative people to articulate how they created their work, and this problem pervades the book. Moss takes this in stride, but there are few eureka moments that feel at all instructive. Still, it’s alway fun to get a glimpse into how artists work. If there’s a theme here, it’s art is hard. Keep trying.
Highlights
The impulse is always, what do you feel most confused about and most unsure about. You can assume that others like you are having similar doubts. As I’ve always said, your job is to preach to the converted. That’s what preachers are supposed to talk about. It’s not the things we know are true, but the things we’re worried might not be true, that contravene our faith. That’s the place to go. Anything good comes from a place of unknowing. — Tony Kushner (Page 41)
You always have a better book in mind than you’re able to write. And one of the things you have to be able to do, if you’re going to write novels, is survive that discrepancy between the book you were able to write and the better book you imagined. — Michael Cunningham (Page 61)
When you read your notebooks, you remeet ideas. You reintroduce them to who you are now. — Max Porter (Page 296)