"Do something to it."

"Jasper Johns, in explaining how to make a work of art, kept things simple. 'Take an object,' he said. 'Do something to it. Do something else to it.' The first time I heard that quotation, it struck me as an oversimplification. But I’ve changed my mind. At bottom, the creative process really is that simple.

     My experience of writing Find the Bad Guy is a perfect example. I didn’t start out with Charlie D. being a Texan. The first drafts of the story were told in a different voice entirely. The narrator wasn’t even called Charlie D. One day, dissatisfied with the pages I’d written, I decided to do something to them. So I re-wrote the story in a Texas twang. Some days later, I did something else: I made Charlie a Michigander putting on this Texan voice. The story is about truth and deceit, so the more convoluted Charlie’s voice became, the better. It seemed funny to me that Charlie was actually from the upper Midwest and had picked up his accent as an adult. It also showed how estranged he was from himself, and hinted at the repercussions of this estrangement, which aren’t in the least bit funny but as serious as can be. After I had the voice, I kept doing things to the narrative. I gave Charlie a job in radio. I gave him a German wife, and made her very tall. I kept doing things to my paper object until it became a story. Dozens of small little decisions, one at a time."
— Jeffrey Eugenides, via Cressida Leyshon, The New Yorker
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"[...] picked off and shunted [...]"

"Fiction asks a lot of people, says Meg Wolitzer, 'to tell them that you need to learn about these characters, to take time out in your day from being frightened for your livelihood and your children, to think about Susan and Bill, who don't exist. It's a nervy thing to ask.' She asks it of herself every time she sits down to write – 'What fiction ought to do' – and the answer had better be good. 'The anxiety makes me a stronger writer.'

     The Interestings, Wolitzer's ninth novel, is more ambitious than any she has written so far, tracking a group of friends from the moment they meet, at summer camp, up through the decades of their lives. It has done very well in the US, so that at 54, Wolitzer has become, as a friend joked to her recently, 'a 30-year overnight success.'
     The novel deserves acclaim, but it is a surprising hit, perhaps, given its subject matter and the downbeat nature of the heroine. It is a novel about envy, but not in the grand sense. Rather, it unpicks the insidious resentment that grows between friends who start out in the same place and whose fortunes diverge. 'Nobody tells you how long you should keep doing something,' she writes of the least successful in the circle, 'before you give up forever.'
     [...] Wolitzer remembers coming to New York with no money in her 20s and being surprised as the lives of herself and her friends started to diverge. "I lived in a tiny apartment, and there was this sense that we all had talent and would move forward. And suddenly people were picked off and shunted into these beautiful apartments that obviously their families had paid for, and I hadn't been told that this was going to happen. And it really could affect the trajectory of your whole career.'"
"— Emma Brockes, The Guardian
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"[…] But does the compulsion to excel make anybody happy? Or is it, rather, a prescription for disappointment in oneself and in the 'circumscribed world'?
     That’s the question that comes to preoccupy Jules Jacobson, the ambitious protagonist of Meg Wolitzer’s remarkable ninth novel, The Interestings, whose inclusive vision and generous sweep place it among the ranks of books like Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom and Jeffrey Eugenides’s Marriage Plot.
     The Interestings” is warm, all-American and acutely perceptive about the feelings and motivations of its characters, male and female, young and old, gay and straight; but it’s also stealthily, unassumingly and undeniably a novel of ideas. Wolitzer has been writing excellent fiction for 30 years, and it has always been this astute. From the start, her subject has been the practical, emotional and sexual fallout of women’s liberation, particularly as it affects mothers and children. But here she has written a novel that speaks as directly to men as to women. With this book, she has surpassed herself. Just don’t call her exceptional."
— Liesl Schillinger, The New York Times
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PO'd Publishers Poo-poo Pulitzer Prize Pronouncement

Joseph Pulitzer, 1847 - 1911
(From: Wikipedia)

"One day after the Pulitzer Prize board said it would not award a Pulitzer in fiction for the first time in 35 years, the publishing industry was still seething, with some going as far as offering surrogate winners.
     Publishers Weekly posted a list of books from 2011 that could have been chosen, including Chad Harbach’s Art of Fielding and The Buddha in the Attic by Julie Otsuka.
     On Tuesday, Sarah McNally, the owner of McNally Jackson Books in SoHo, said she would present her own awards to The Great Night by Chris Adrian, We the Animals by Justin Torres and Pym by Mat Johnson.
     Publishers Weekly posted a list of books from 2011 that could have been chosen, including Chad Harbach’s Art of Fielding and The Buddha in the Attic by Julie Otsuka.
     On Twitter, Doubleday suggested the Twitterverse choose its own Pulitzer winner (using the hashtag #TwitterPulitzer), immediately prompting nominations like The Leftovers by Tom Perrotta and The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides.
     Striking a rare note of optimism, publishers of the three fiction finalists said they hoped the books would nevertheless get a boost in a rare year without a winner in the spotlight. 'In years past it’s the Pulitzer winner that captures all the attention and all the sales,' said Paul Bogaards, a spokesman for Alfred A. Knopf. 'But since this year there was not a winner and there’s much conversation about the finalists, this may be an opportunity and a catalyst for sales.'”
— Julie Bosman, The New York Times
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