Advice For Aspiring Novelists (2)

This is National Novel Writing Month, the month in which people try to write a 50,000+ word novel in 30 days. I made my own attempt, and wrote in a previous post about the sheer volume of (mostly pointless) advice for a aspiring novelists. But Cees Nooteboom, the deliciously quirky Dutch novelist, sums it up best:

"Try the next five things: try to get a little bit of asthma [like Proust], lay down in bed half-suffocated, line your room with cork, and write Remembrance of Things Past. As soon as you see that it doesn't work for you, try a lectern and smoke a pipe, or then again, before you commit suicide, go big game hunting [like Hemingway] and then from time to time write a novel about life. Or, well, whatever, do like Nooteboom: go to Spain, buy notebooks, and write 500 words a day with a fountain pen, Mont Blanc, of course. This happens to be my way of doing it.”

Here's Eleanor Watchtel's interview with Nooteboom.