Sterling Terrell

smart ideas from books

The Age Most Good Novels Are Written

The Age Most Good Novels Are Written

Maybe it is true that most good novels are written around middle age?

  • Hemingway wrote Old Man And the Sea at 53.
  • Fyodor Dostoyevsky wrote The Brothers Karamazov at 59.
  • And And Andrews wrote The Noticer at 50.

You have enough experience to be at the top of your game – but you have not run out of all your good ideas yet.

I need about 100 more examples of bestselling books to fully convince me, but it sounds right.

Once the new century got underway I began mostly to occupy myself with nonfiction. This is in accordance with my long held belief that age doesn’t favor the novelist. The poet Richard Howard and many others ridicule this point, but I remain wedded to it. There are, of course, exceptions—in the arts as in life there are exceptions. But, in the main, fiction’s greatest achievements were made by the middle-aged.

-Larry McMurtry, Literary Life (Amazon)

Practice Being Stupid

Practice Being Stupid

I love this idea on how one should practice being stupid with their art.

Sol Lewitt says:

You must practice being stupid, dumb, unthinking, empty. Then you will be able to DO… Try to do some BAD work — the worst you can think of and see what happens but mainly relax and let everything go to hell — you are not responsible for the world — you are only responsible for your work — so DO IT.

You first get in the routine of making art (writing, drawing, sculpting, whatever).

The point is that you develop a habit, a system.

This practice becomes a habit of work and a habit of quantity.

Then and only then (in the margins) should one worry about quality.

Kleon finishes the idea with this:

“Good” can be a stifling word, a word that makes you hesitate and stare at a blank page and second-guess yourself and throw stuff in the trash. What’s important is to get your hands moving and let the images come. Whether it’s good or bad is beside the point. Just make something.

Exactly.