Norman Mailer

Was sitting in my hotel room in Houston and saw a Shaun Hannity/Norman Mailer head-to-head bit of ridiculousness. I could not take it. Mailer was talking about how Shakespeare enabled England to survive all its various ups and downs (royal scandals, empire-building, post-empirical downsizing, etc.). If nothing else, it was an interesting point. But Hannity with his incredible, preposterous, self-serious zealotry, kept turning it back George Bush. I turned it.

I never really liked Norman Mailer's writing. I always thought it was a little too raw; a little too self-serious in its own way. But I prefer him over Hannity anyday. And I like what you had to say about his commitment to writing.

I'm reading this book called "The Portable MFA." It's a compendium of all the techniques available to fiction writers, and it's no half-bad, but of course I let it get me all twisted. That is, I was reading along, following its discussion of plot, and thinking about my own book, and deciding to scrap the whole plot and start over...you know how it goes, I was into deep analysis/paralysis.

Then I turned the page and there was a sidebar that said, basically, "Don't think about any of this stuff while you're writing. Just write. Think about this stuff when you're revising."

Oh. Good point.