Journal

Saturday, February 19, 2005

25,000 words typed in 3 days, and my hand hurts

Here's a quote that struck me as being wise and true this morning, from the film critic C. A. Lejeune. She was an English writer from the earlier part of the last century. It's from her review of Coward's Blithe Spirit.

"It is true that it may be easier to have wit than, in the deepest and most enduring sense, to have imagination. But it is easier to pretend to have imagination than to pretend to have wit. A pretender may get away with a phoney poem, because it is the privilege of a poet to be mysterious. But a pretender cannot get away with a phoney joke, because it is the point of a joke to be seen."

...

I finished typing the handwritten stuff of ANANSI BOYS last night, and came home from my writing cabin. Now I have to turn all the typed pages into things that make sense, follow sequentially, and don't contradict each other. I suspect that there are at least two scenes, perhaps three, that will turn out to need to be written once all that is done, but I also think that, barring disasters, I'll have a solid first draft of a book to show my editor in a few days.