3.22.2012

How I began writing


After three months in France, I kept toying with the idea of starting to write. By then I’d been listening to audio tapes of writers I liked for at least a year. Of tem all, I most enjoyed listening to Sidney Sheldon.


I said to myself it was better to write a bad book than not write at all.

As I didn’t have a laptop, I began writing on paper. I warmly recommend this to all future writers, at least initially. Due to space limitations you’ll soon learn to create sentences in such a way that there is as little correcting needed later as possible.

And so I wrote the bit where kidnappers kidnap the rich Emely Donnovan and bury her alive out of revenge. Don’t worry – Emely survives. The way I described the kidnapping came as a very positive surprise to me. The hairs on my body stood up as I read it.
Of course I read those 30 pages at least 50 times and found mistakes every time. As I was writing on paper and then had to constantly erase things and correct them, I gradually began making fewer and fewer mistakes. When you read a text for the first time, you catch the most obvious mistakes and the smaller ones escape completely. And when you remove the smaller ones, new ones appear. And then come the smallest, tiniest of mistakes and you finally get the text to be as close to perfect as possible. It’s completely impossible to remove all the mistakes at the first reading.

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