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About visits
Once when I had everything settled about a new apartment in Manhattan— advance rent paid, the lease signed, the movers ready —I was informed that I could not have it because it was a professional apartment. Writers are not professionals, because “their clients do not come to them.” I thought of writing to the Department of Housing or whoever made this law, “You have no idea how many characters ring my doorbell and come to me every day, and I absolutely need them for my existence,” but I never wrote this, only reflected that prostitutes could probably qualify, but writers couldn’t. Patricia Highsmith. Plotting and writing suspense
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Sometimes on Sunday
Edna O’Brien, the talented Irish novelist, said in an interview, “Writers are always working. They never stop.” This is the nature of the job of writing, at least of writing fiction. Writers are either developing an idea or they are questing, even if unconsciously, for the germ of an idea. I create things out of boredom with reality and with the sameness of routine and objects around me. Therefore, I don’t dislike this boredom which encroaches on me every now and then, and I even try to create it by routine. I do not “have to work” in the sense that I must drive myself to it or make myself…
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What to do if you can’t create a lovely villain?
<< I think it is also possible to make a hero-psychopath one hundred percent sick and revolting, and still make him fascinating for his very blackness and all-round depravity. I very nearly did this with Bruno in Strangers on a Train , for even Bruno’s generosity is neither consistent nor well-placed, and there is nothing else to be said in his favor. But in that story, Bruno’s evil was offset by Guy’s “goodness,” which considerably simplified the problem I had of providing a likable hero, as Guy became the likable hero. It depends on the writer’s skill, whether he can have a frolic with the evil in his hero-psychopath. If…
