I wonder if that sense of dislocation comes from writing anything substantive kind of being a trick— in the end, it can create the illusion of someone saying something important and powerful in a single go.
But the reality of writing is that you produce something at loads of different moments in your life, out of order, not always seeing the full shape of what you’re doing. And so when you see a complete work, the gap between the author who emerges from the text and the writer who cobbled them together is a lot more stark. But you only really see it for yourself, and so that is uncomfortable.
So maybe it’s that gap between the author that has come about from all these different versions of you collaborating and trying to be honest, and the version of you existing right now, thinking “the person who wrote this seems very impressive?” But that’s because they haven’t created their work all at once. The author is a trick pulled by the writer.
This is really interesting, thanks Robert. I wrote this book over the course of a year, and spent a lot of intensive time on it in the last third of that year, so it probably felt more like a cohesive experience than it might with a novel that's written in fits and starts over a decade, for example. Nevertheless, the feel of the labour and the feel of the product are always different, and that's a strange thing, especially since anyone can look at the product but nobody else was there for the process.
Your new book looks incredibly interesting- I’m definitely going to pre-order a copy! Good luck with the launch and all that follows…😎
Thank you so much!
I wonder if that sense of dislocation comes from writing anything substantive kind of being a trick— in the end, it can create the illusion of someone saying something important and powerful in a single go.
But the reality of writing is that you produce something at loads of different moments in your life, out of order, not always seeing the full shape of what you’re doing. And so when you see a complete work, the gap between the author who emerges from the text and the writer who cobbled them together is a lot more stark. But you only really see it for yourself, and so that is uncomfortable.
So maybe it’s that gap between the author that has come about from all these different versions of you collaborating and trying to be honest, and the version of you existing right now, thinking “the person who wrote this seems very impressive?” But that’s because they haven’t created their work all at once. The author is a trick pulled by the writer.
This is really interesting, thanks Robert. I wrote this book over the course of a year, and spent a lot of intensive time on it in the last third of that year, so it probably felt more like a cohesive experience than it might with a novel that's written in fits and starts over a decade, for example. Nevertheless, the feel of the labour and the feel of the product are always different, and that's a strange thing, especially since anyone can look at the product but nobody else was there for the process.