How do writers confront the challenges of our craft? Cigarettes and alcohol. I know that sounds like a snarky answer but it's the gospel truth. There is a reason that so many of the Greats were alcoholics. There is also a reason so many of them were mad.

I can only speak as a writer of fiction here but I believe there are similarities among all artistic mediums. But when it comes to fiction, the main struggle is keeping any manner of control over your characters. Writing a novel or a short story is like an unnatural way of giving birth. Writers have the power to create life. Immortal life, at that. It's dangerous. The characters and the stories they need told can overtake a writer.

It's a beautiful, powertful, magical process but it almost always leads to an early grave.

Description: Trying to figure out what goes first and what goes second.

Transcript: Well I think writing is . . . It’s not the actual sentences. I mean it’s not the language, I think, for most people. I think you can write a sentence as well as you can write it. I mean it sounds like a truism; but in fact if you work on it long enough, write it enough times, you can write it as well as you can write it. You may not write it as well as John Updike could write it, but you can write it as well as you can write it. The hard part of most writing, I think, is the structure of wanting to know . . . of trying to figure out what goes first, and what goes second, and how that leads into something that doesn’t jump around. Or at least the hard part of the sort of writing I usually do. I think the hard part of, say, trying to write a column or a piece of humor is just staring at the page and realizing you might not be able to write anything. I mean that’s not true in reporting pieces where you have sort of a corpus to work on.

Recorded on: 9/5/07

Description: Kurt Andersen discusses the struggle of writing. He says all writing is a moment-to-moment struggle to find the right words within the right structure.

Transcript:

But any kind of writing – non-fiction or fiction – is a struggle. It’s a very, you know, moment-to-moment struggle of figuring out the right . . . where the right sentence, the right paragraph, the right page, the right structure for the larger thing. And when you’re writing a book – my two novels have been 600 odd pages – that’s . . . there’s . . . that becomes an enormous structure to . . . to try to . . . to try to get as right as possible. So that’s . . . It’s a . . . It’s a pleasurable struggle when you’re done; but it is a struggle while it’s going on. I actually find the work of writing fiction less of a struggle, less of a stressful procedure than I do writing a 1,700 word essay. That to me is . . . the . . . the essay, or journalism really is sort of . . . is almost pure struggle. And then I’m only happy when I’m done. Whereas fiction actually . . . writing fiction has moments of . . . of pleasure amid the struggle while it’s going on.

Recorded On: 7/5/07