Sunil Yapa shares his ideas on how to find the time and money to finish a novel. Pair with Janet Potter’s Millions guide on finding the perfect title for that book in your drawer.
Finish Your Novel
Disappearance Man
“Well, continuing with my policy of baring my soul, Dwight Garner said something like, the book was like one of those satellite photos of North Korea when I talked about the second marriage. I obviously had very little access to Updike from ‘77 on, really. And I cheated a bit by using Ian McEwan as my spy in the Updike household. First of all, Updike definitely did pull up the drawbridge and retire into his castle and I thought, in a sense, that this should be respected. He had decided on his persona, at that point—the highly professional man of letters. And I thought, why not let him go out with that persona intact?” At The Awl, Elon Green talks with Adam Begley about his new biography of John Updike.
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Happy Birthday, Joseph Heller
“The morning after the opening sentence took shape, Heller “arrived at work”—at the Merrill Anderson Company—“with my pastry and container of coffee and a mind brimming with ideas, and immediately in longhand put down on a pad the first chapter of an intended novel.” The handwritten manuscript totaled about 20 pages. He titled it Catch-18. The year was 1953.” Happy Birthday Joseph Heller, author of the anti-war classic Catch-22, born this day in 1923 in Coney Island, New York.
“In such circumstances, how could there fail to be a swarm of ghosts?”
Recommended Reading: People Who Eat Darkness author Richard Lloyd Parry’s stunning essay on Reverend Kaneda, a Japanese monk performing exorcisms to solve his region’s “ghost problem.”
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Mon Semblable, Mon Frere
In a 6,000 word essay for The Point, founding editor Jon Baskin wades into the personal and professional psychodrama of the Franzen–Wallace friendship. Beneath the public surface, finds deep questions about the “novel of the self,” the “novel of society,” and the life worth living.
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Hey, both those links go back to the old “Find Your Title” article.
Thanks, Phil! We’ve fixed it.