Martin Amis (post 5), in interview, said, “My mind, like everyone else’s mind, is full of jabbering voices.” Is that true of your mind?

“The idea [for a novel] can be incredibly thin—a situation, a character in a certain place at a certain time. With Money, for example, I had an idea of a big fat guy in New York, trying to make a film. That was all” (1, p. 335).

“Writers…don’t know what makes them write…They don’t know why they plant minor characters early on in a novel who turn up with a specific function later on. When things are going well, you do have the sense that what you’re writing is being fed to you in some way…It’s a secret, even to the writer” (1, pp. 345-346).

“My mind, like everyone else’s mind, is full of jabbering voices” (1, p. 350).

“I feel that if they [characters] are alive in your mind, they’re going to have ideas of their own and take you places you wouldn’t perhaps have gone” (1, p. 352).

Comment

Most people’s minds are not like Martin Amis’s, which is why most people are not successful fiction writers.

1. Martin Amis, 1998 interview, pp. 332-357, in The Paris Review Interviews, III. New York, Picador, 2008.