From an interview with Amanda Marbais on KUCI (Writers On Writing):
"Back when I was a student in an MFA program, you took it for granted that one of the reasons that a student wanted to be a writer was because that student loved literature and loved reading. And now it is far from uncommon to meet an aspiring writer who says that they don't want to read and in fact they don’t like reading, they don’t have really any interest in literature but they want to be a writer anyway. That's very difficult to work with. And I don’t really understand it because it's so different from the way I saw things and still see things…
“…as I recall, when I was young, there was really an emphasis on this idea that writing was a vocation and that you should be thinking of it as a vocation and not as a career. Now you'll find a lot of students in writing programs for whom it's sort of seen as more of a lifestyle that they're looking for. And one of the reasons why they want to be a writer is because they think it has a certain kind of life that will not only be enjoyable but will lift their self-esteem. And I think about what somebody like Philip Roth would say is how frustrating writing is. ‘It's like baseball, you fail two-thirds of the time.’ And toward the end of his life saying, “I just can’t do it anymore, I just cant face this failure all the time.’ That is very familiar to any professional writer.”
A humbling, lens-correcting quote.
Last night I was reading a few pieces out loud for a reading at Octopus Literary Salon later this month and I realized how many typos slip in there and how much I’m not revising. (On the Creative Nonfiction podcast Kiese Laymon said the Heavy you see on shelves was his twentieth revision. Of the entire book. Jesus.) Nunez addresses general laziness in the rest of her interview. So, I was excited last night to remember I have the ability to catch my own mistakes and edit myself. And I’ve discovered that when I know an audience awaits, I edit way harder. Maybe there’s a way to mimic those conditions regularly…or find a writing group, which I am looking for.
I’ve been noticing The Friend for months and months. Excited to read.
P.S. Nunez ALSO heard "if you can do anything other than write, do that" when she was a student! From Elizabeth Hardwick!