“I don’t teach creative writing because I think it’s a fatuous thing to do, but if anybody young asks me for advice, what I say to them is: ‘Do you, when you look back at a page of your work, get inflicted with a dreadful sense of futility and a sense that it’s cardboard, and it’s meaningless and that it doesn’t express an iota of what you wanted to say, and that it’s hackneyed, and it’s clichéd?’, and they go: ‘Yeah.’
I respond: ‘Right. You’re always going to feel like that. Accept it. It doesn’t matter how many languages you’re translated into, or how many awards you win or accolades you receive, you will still feel that way about what you do’. That is not all art, that is the virtuality of being a writer.”
__________
Will Self, speaking in an interview with Christine Fears.
More from Will:
Filed under: Interview, Writing Tagged: Christine Fears, Communications, Creative Writing, Creativity, interview, Will Self
