Undertow: The John Fante Tapes [Three]
When you start to write a novel or when I start to write a novel, and the pages pile up, you discover before long that there’s a charge from within the work, there’s an undertow that carries you out to sea, as it were, and sometimes you’ll drift away from that undertow and you’ll get out into calm waters, and you’re stuck, and then you become dull. So you have to come back in and find the undertow again so it continues to carry you, hopefully, to the other side or to the other shore. And when you’re sitting at a typewriter trying to write, what you’re trying to do actually is swim back to the current so it’ll pick you up again. And that feeling, that current that you feel, is actually a gut feeling that you must get, and it’ll strike you right – it’s a visceral thing. And when you’ve hit upon it, and you start to write, you know you’re right. You know that what you’re doing is correct and that your direction is correct, and you stay with it.
John Fante in conversation with Ben Pleasants.
You Have Been Reading
(Chief Editor Andrew Gallix during a 3:AM event at the former Aquarium Gallery, Euston) 3:AM Magazine is 10 years old this month. And what a decade it has been, of events, nice words and interviews, as well as the odd book or two. So raise your glasses to another 10 and keep reading the site […]
fragmenta: reading the decades, mad heroines, marginalia
The Bord Gáis Energy Irish Book Awards Book of the Decade poll is in full swing and, much like the recently announced IMPAC shortlist, it’s a pretty uninspiring bunch of strange bedfellows. Though all bases are covered – chick lit, literary fiction, indie fiction, crime fiction & non-fiction – are these really the best Irish […]