What's lucky about my career in general is that I stumbled into what every writer most wants. Not repeating myself and doing strange things has become my trademark.
Jonathan LethemRead
I keep one simple rule that I only move in one direction - I write the book straight through from beginning to end. By following time's arrow, I keep myself sane.
Interpretation
What this quote means
This quote emphasizes the importance of a straightforward and organized approach to tasks, particularly in writing.
Jonathan Lethem conveys the idea that adhering to a linear process in writing not only aids in the completion of projects but also contributes to mental clarity and stability. By following 'time's arrow' – a metaphor for a chronological progression – the writer avoids confusion and chaos, ensuring a more effective and sane workflow.
Themes
WritingProcessLinearClaritySanity
In practice
Example use cases
This quote can be shared in a writing workshop to encourage aspiring authors to adopt a structured approach.
More from Jonathan Lethem
All quotes →I learned to write fiction the way I learned to read fiction - by skipping the parts that bored me.
Jonathan LethemRead
Insomnia is a variant of Tourette's--the waking brain races, sampling the world after the world has turned away, touching it everywhere, refusing to settle, to join the collective nod. The insomniac brain is a sort of conspiracy theorist as well, believing too much in its own paranoiac importance--as though if it were to blink, then doze, the world might be overrun by some encroaching calamity, which its obsessive musings are somehow fending off.
Jonathan LethemRead
Apparently Brooklyn needn't always push itself to be something else, something conscious and anxious, something pointed toward Manhattan.... Brooklyn might sometimes also be pleased, as here on Flatbush, to be its grubby, enduring self.
Jonathan LethemRead
I'd have been a filmmaker or a cartoonist or something else which extended from the visual arts into the making of narratives if I hadn't been able to shift into fiction.
Jonathan LethemRead
It was only as I wrote about it that I began to find paths of access to feelings that were intolerable to me then.
Jonathan LethemRead
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