I love Junot Diaz.
I’d always loved his short stories and then, I fell in love with his novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. (Apparently, I wasn’t the only one because it won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction last year.) But I really love him for this essay about how freaking HARD writing can be sometimes.
www.oprah.com/article/omagazine/200911-omag-junot-diaz-writing via www.robinwasserman.com/
I am trying to take his words to heart as I struggle through my new WIP which is starting to feel like a Pedro Almadovar-directed version of "Glee" meets "Lord of the Flies." (In the the immortal words of "Spinal Tap": "There’s such a fine line between stupid and clever.") I feel like there is a spot on my wall that reads: Your Head Here.
Anyway, I love Junot Diaz for his honesty about how difficult writing his novel proved to be and especially for these words:
"Because, in truth, I didn’t become a writer the first time I put pen to paper or when I finished my first book (easy) or second one (hard). You see, in my view a writer is a writer not because she writes well and easily, because she has amazing talent, because everything she does is golden. In my view a writer is a writer because even when there is no hope, even when nothing you do shows any sign of promise, you keep writing anyway."
Yeah. That. Thank you, Junot Diaz.
Back to it.