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Kill Your Darlings And 4 More Rules For Doing Creative Work

29/05/2013

In Forty-one False Starts: Essays on Artists and Writers, author Janet Malcolm reveals creative insights from artists ranging from (...)
In Forty-one False Starts: Essays on Artists and Writers, author Janet Malcolm reveals creative insights from ranging from Diane Arbus to Gossip Girl creator Cecily von Ziegesar. Janet Malcolm is a writer’s writer. If you’re a practitioner of any kind of nonfiction, Malcolm is a must-read for her rigor, her style, and her wisdom on the subject of journalism. Her most famous quote, from the bestseller The Journalist and the Murderer--“Every journalist who is not too stupid or full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible”--is a good reminder to remain self-critical. Malcolm’s latest collection, Forty-one False Starts: Essays on Artists and Writers, is full of such reminders, not just for writers, but for any creative person who hopes to have an output anywhere near as impressive and deep as Malcolm’s. In the intro to Forty-one False Starts, the New Yorker writer Ian Frazier describes Malcolm’s work thusly: “For a work of nonfiction to be really good, it must compete in the ‘open’ category; that is, it can’t justify itself merely by fulfilling its important journalistic task of informing the reader; it has to aspire to be art, whatever that is and however one aspires to it,” which is an excellent lesson to remember: No matter what you’re doing creatively, you can and should set lofty expectations for yourself, as Malcolm does.Read Full Story    
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