Paul Kent - How Writers Write

HOW WRITERS WRITE

First published in 2014
By Creative Content Ltd, Roxburghe House, 273-287 Regent Street, London, W1B 2HA.
Copyright 2014 Paul Kent

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Cover Design by Daniel at HCT Design

eISBN 9781908807267

HOW WRITERS WRITE

by

Paul Kent

Paul Kent 2014

CONTENTS

WRITERS APPEARING IN THIS BOOK

Aesop, Conrad Aiken, Henri Alain-Fournier, Laura Albert, Richard Aldington, Woody Allen, Isabel Allende, Martin Amis, Sherwood Anderson, Maya Angelou, Louis Aragon, Aristotle, Matthew Arnold, Margaret Atwood, W. H. Auden, St Augustine, Jane Austen, Francis Bacon, Beryl Bainbridge, Hugo Ball, Howard Barker, Julian Barnes, John Barth, Charles Baudelaire, Matt Beaumont, Samuel Beckett, Aphra Behn, Saul Bellow, Pat Benatar, John Berger, Louis de Bernires, Bruno Bettelheim, William Blake, Umberto Boccioni, James Boswell, David Bowie, William Boyd, Ray Bradbury, Andr Breton, Robert Browning, Johann Jakob Brcker, Richard Maurice Bucke, John Bunyan, Fanny Burney, William Burroughs, Samuel Butler, Lord Byron, Italo Calvino, Albert Camus, Truman Capote, John Carey, Peter Carey, E. H. Carr, Angela Carter, W. J. Cash, Lodovico Castelvetro, Miguel de Cervantes, Bruce Chatwin, Geoffrey Chaucer, Anton Chekhov, Vincent Cheng, Agatha Christie, the Coen brothers, J. M. Coetzee, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Joseph Conrad, Peter Cook, Rachel Cooke, Malcolm Cowley, Hart Crane, Michael Cunningham, Donald Cupitt, S. Foster Damon, Dante, Louis de Bernires, Choderlos de Laclos, Thomas De Quincey, Daniel Defoe, Don DeLillo, Charles Dickens, Joan Didion, E. L. Doctorow, John Donne, Hilda Doolittle, John Dryden, douard Dujardin, Paul Dukes, Umberto Eco, Albert Einstein, James Elford, George Eliot, T. S. Eliot, Ralph Ellison, Paul luard, Ralph Waldo Emerson, William Empsom, Brian Eno, Euripides, William Faulkner, Henry Fielding, F. Scott Fitzgerald, E. M. Forster, Sir James Frazer, Sigmund Freud, Carlos Fuentes, Lady Gaga, Jos Ortega y Gasset, Andr Gide, Allen Ginsberg, George Gissing, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Adam Gopnik, Nadine Gordimer, Edmund Gosse, Graham Greene, Philippa Gregory, Thomas Hardy, Joanne Harris, Robert Harris, Jim Harrison, Raoul Hausmann, Martin Heidegger, Joseph Heller, Ernest Hemingway, Heraclitus, Hesiod, Hermann Hesse, George Birkbeck Hill, E. D. Hirsch, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Homer, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Horace, Richard Huelsenbeck, T. E. Hulme, Aldous Huxley, J. K. Huysmans, Lewis Hyde, Henrik Ibsen, Henry James, William James, Marcel Janco, Juan Ramn Jimmez, Billy Joel, Samuel Johnson, Ben Jonson, James Joyce, Franz Kafka, John Keats, Jack Kerouac, Chaka Khan, Stephen King, Charles Kingsley, Louis Kronenberger, Milan Kundera, William Langland, D. H. Lawrence, Annie Lennox, C. S. Lewis, Sinclair Lewis, Wyndham Lewis, Longinus, Amy Lowell, Robert Lowell, Archibald MacLeish, Louis MacNeice, Norman Mailer, Stephen Mallarm, David Malouf, Thomas Mann, Hilary Mantel, Gabriel Garca Mrquez, Yann Martel, W. Somerset Maugham, Andr Maurois, Pete McCarthy, John Milton, Dudley Moore, Marianne Moore, Sir Thomas More, Jean Moras, William Morris, Toni Morrison, Vladimir Nabokov, Johnny Nash, Frank Norris, Patrick OBrian, C. K. Ogden, Ben Okri, George Orwell, Chuck Palahniuk, John Dos Passos, Thomas Love Peacock, Walker Percy, Pindar, Sylvia Plath, Plato, Edgar Allan Poe, Alexander Pope, Ezra Pound, Terry Pratchett, Marcel Proust, Philip Pullman, Herbert Read, I. A. Richards, Samuel Richardson, Arthur Rimbaud, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Richard Rolle, Philip Roth, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, J. K. Rowling, Arundhati Roy, Todd Rundgren, Salman Rushdie, J. D. Salinger, Carl Sandburg, Dorothy L. Sayers, Kurt Schwitters, Clive Scott, Sir Walter Scott, Vikram Seth, William Shakespeare, George Bernard Shaw, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Alan Sherman, Sir Philip Sidney, Upton Sinclair, Zadie Smith, Socrates, Robert Southey, Edmund Spenser, Lee Spinks, Gertrude Stein, George Steiner, Laurence Sterne, Wallace Stevens, Bram Stoker, William Styron, Jonathan Swift, Arthur Symons, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Paul Theroux, Hunter S. Thompson, Henry David Thoreau, J. R. R. Tolkien, Leo Tolstoy, Thomas Traherne, Anthony Trollope, Tristan Tzara, John Updike, Paul Valry, Paul Verlaine, Gore Vidal, Tom Waits, Alice Walker, Robert Penn Warren, Dale Wasserman, Evelyn Waugh, E. B. White, Walt Whitman, Oscar Wilde, Geoffrey Willans, Edmund Wilson, Ludwig Wittgenstein, P. G. Wodehouse, Thomas Wolfe, Tom Wolfe, Virginia Woolf, William Wordsworth, Pete Wylie, Xenophanes, W. B. Yeats, Natan Zach, Frank Zappa, mile Zola

PREFACE

Lets be realistic: we cant all be great instinctive literary geniuses. Most of us cant simply pick up a pen or sit at a keyboard and bash out deathless prose, poetry or drama thats going to be read, appreciated and studied long into the future. Its not a gift granted to many.

But it doesnt stop thousands, even millions, of us wanting to write and/or taking up writing as a hobby or even as a career. The popularity of creative-writing courses is testimony to that: in fact, theyre part of an entire industry for which the digital world could almost have been created to order. Just about anyone with access to a computer can not only be a writer, but be their own agent and publisher as well. Writing has been democratized.

So now the means are in place, what about the motive? What makes so many of us want to write? According to the celebrated novelist Don DeLillo, the act of writing addresses a deep-seated human need:

Writing is a form of personal freedom. It frees us from the mass identity we see all around us. In the end, writers will write not to be outlaw heroes of some underculture but mainly to save themselves, to survive as individuals.

Self-expression can be fundamental not just to our sense of identity, but also, DeLillo implies, to our sanity. Which is why taking a writing course is often recommended to those who have experienced life-changing trauma. Actively working with and through thoughts and feelings, giving them form and meaning, can result in greater success than more passive forms of therapy involving couches, Viennese neurologists, and large bank loans.