News & Blog by Peter Rix
Read the latest news and bulletins, essays, features, opinions from our bestselling authors. Find out what's being said, debated, and discussed in the world of books and ideas.
Here is the 6th and final – for the moment – rationale for devoting a decade and 47 drafts to my story, Water Under Water. Why I Wrote 6: Pleasure. I loved every minute of it. From those afternoons in a French hotel garden among the rabbits and peripatetic poppies (in the pic below, oui, c’est moi), to rainy Saturdays, to late nights propped up in bed with my laptop, writing was pure, unadulterated...
Why I Wrote – I’m up to reason 4 on my list. Why I Wrote 4: The self-sacrificing search for truth. In the Paris of Pound and Stein and Hemingway, it certainly played well, the writer as aesthete, devoting body and soul to the pursuit of that heroically unattainable perfect story. And oh, how that crowd loved to show us the cuts and bruises, the scars of their purity. For me, though, it hasn’t...
I’m working through an unreliable list of reasons for writing. Why I Wrote 3: Something really important to say. You think you have something that people really, truly do need to hear. Of course you do, just like the rest of us. No, no, you protest, mine really is important…you must listen. It’s precocious, isn’t it? Like a shrill four-year demanding his mother pay attention to his observations...
Why Does Anyone Write a Novel? Why did I? Why I Wrote 1: Money? Listen, I could be the next Dan Brown or J.K. Rowling. Sell a few million copies and sashay off to the south of France for the winter. And how cool to be able to do it all from home, with the odd wander up to the coffee shop or down to the pub? Trouble is, I’ve done the numbers. (For a brief, rebellious period in my early years...
What got me thinking about why I wrote a book was that I never had. Not really. That, and my mate, Fred Fink. What Fredie actually said, over our second coffee on a wet and miserable afternoon, was; ‘I’m not even sure I want to write.’ Fair enough question for him, seeing as how he’s in the middle of an intensive, and expensive, creative writing course. But, it hardly applied to me, did...
