Frankly, I don’t want to hear how some writers find it easy and fun to write a novel. This just depresses me because writing a novel for me is not easy and fun. It’s long and hard with maybe occasional glimmers of excitement in what’s  basically years of self-doubt and deep angst, knowing that the rest of the world is out there doing something really useful while I’m sitting around in my bedroom slippers writing pretend people doing pretend things. 

This is why I found Annie Dillard so inspiring on NPR a few weeks ago.  She told Scott Simon she would never write another novel, and that her just published The Maytrees took her ten years to write and just about killed her. (How I loved hearing that as I struggle through draft number 1,979)  She said she cut the manuscript down from 1200 pages to 230. She was very funny and frank and very inspiring.  She said Books On Tape wanted to edit down her last novel, which was very long, from eight tapes to two, and she finally agreed to four tapes. When they sent her the revised shortened manuscript she was thrilled. She thought the book was so much better with their cuts.

She also said that first you have to simplify the story, then expand it. She went through every single word in The Maytrees cutting out as many modifiers as possible, trying to find one or two syllable words instead of three or more, and making sure there were no passive verbs. This is about as good a piece of advice on writing as you’ll ever come across.