Process: The Writing Lives of Great Authors

by Sarah Stodola

To paraphrase Salman Rushdie, writing can be a grueling, unforgiving business, but even at its worst it’s better than having a regular job.

Genius, I have concluded, is the presence of not one ability but several that work together in tandem. Genius is far more tedious, far less romantic, far more rote, far less effortless, than we imagine it. The great writers in this book do not by and large put the right words on the right page in the right order on the first try. But in the place of perfection, they possess the quality of perseverance and a willingness to recognize their own shortcomings.

For Orwell, it was most important to secure the hunk of clay first and worry about sculpting it later.

When Joyce began to experiment with writing about his own artistic ambitions, he finally hit on the thing that convinced him he was a writer. As biographer Richard Ellmann put it, he “found he could become an artist by writing about the process of becoming an artist.”