Avant-garde friendliness

Nicholson Baker interviewed in Full Stop.

Is there such a thing as craft in fiction?

Of course you can get better at writing if you do it a lot, but the moments when I feel I’ve got the craft down are usually the moments when I’m writing least well. There’s something useful about being humbled by the difficulty of what you’re doing, and by the sense that you’re trying to figure it out. It’s maybe better not to know what you’re doing, or at least that’s what I tell myself, because most of the time I really don’t feel that I’ve figured it out. When I was starting out, I’d check out books from the library on how to write, and they were useful to me in that I rebelled against some of the rules.

Are there any rules that you do live by?

“Tell the truth” is vague enough to be useful. “The best is the enemy of the good.” That’s a helpful one if things are going badly. Get to the end. “Finish” is a helpful one that I have trouble with. It’s very hard to finish. It’s much more fun to set something aside and research and learn things about some brand new territory. Research is a terrible temptation, at least for me.

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