Writing Advice Picked Up on the Weekend

The cold that chased me through the Rabbit Hole and Continuum finally caught up with me over the last weekend. I picked up a couple of books to keep me entertained over the weekend of coughing, spluttering, and spending some quality time in bed. By the time you read this, I’ll have spent two days living on cold-and-flu tablets and Peter Corris novels, in addition to some non-fiction in the form of The Believer Book of Writers Talking to Writers. 

Thus far, my favourite entry has been a conversation between Paul Aster and Jonothan Letham, which included one of those perfect answers you can’t help sharing:

PA: You try to surprise yourself. You go against what you’ve done before. You want to burn up and destroy all your previous work; you want to reinvent yourself with every project. Once you fall into habits, I think, you’re dead as an artist. You have to challenge yourself and never rest on your laurels, never think about what you’ve done in the past. Just say, that’s done, now I’m tackling something else. It’s certain that the world is large enough and interesting enough to take a different approach each time you sit down to write about it.

Yes. That.