Read all the time, write all the time. Waiting for inspiration, you'll be waiting until you're dead and in the grave. Try to publish the good stuff, just keep trying, but, never stop reading or writing. Even if you never get published or even if you do and no one buys your stuff, it's ultimately for your spirit to grow and be free, right? So, you've won either way.
I find McEwan to be a writer's writer, if that makes sense... there's so much you can learn and take from his fiction and interviews, that is so enriching for your writerly rituals and craft... this interview is a classic case in point..
I’ve always loved writing. While it may not work in the long run, I’ve been concentrating on one mega story series, and that’s how I like it. It might not be what gives me success but it’s what I love doing. And it kinda did start as a simpler story, just without an end… My story is almost like a giant conglomerate of all of the thoughts and feelings I’ve had over the past years, and trying to make it make sense as a story. And it won’t make complete sense, but I’ve tried. I’ve been taking elements from my past stories and either fixing or keeping them. Writing should start as a hobby, and all things you hope to get into, you can’t go in expecting success with anything, you have to enjoy it before you can succeed at it.
I think someone teaching you how to tell a story is like someone offering to pick you up in thier arms and carry you when you have a feeling you know how to walk anyway and so it just would not be right or healthy in any way. But your advise is not like that. I got inspired
Everything after Black Dogs feels like the work of someone else; someone stuffier, more pompous. It seems a cruel trick of fate that as his audience grew his sense of it shrank.
