Jess Walter's literary rulebook
Which rules govern literature? How to maintain order in the empire of the imagination?
In this podcast we find out how writers do it. How do they manage to make their characters do what they want? How do they keep their ideas under control? Where does creative license end and discipline start? What is most important: talent or craft?
Every writer has their own ideas about “the profession”, and many have written about it. Numerous famous authors have invented their own writing rules. In this podcast, our guest puts a couple of these axioms to the test, and at the end of the conversation they come up with one writing rule, one literary law of their own.
Episode nineteen:
Jess Walter, the award-winning, best-selling author of eight novels, two books of short stories and one nonfiction book. His novel Beautiful Ruins was a #1 New York Times bestseller and spent more than a year on the bestseller list. His work has been published in 34 languages. His most recent book is the acclaimed novel So Far Gone.
The writing rules of Jess Walter
“A novel that does not uncover a hitherto unknown segment of existence is immoral. Knowledge is the novel’s only morality.”
"So long as you write what you wish to write, that is all that matters; and whether it matters for the ages or only for hours, nobody can say."
“We tell ourselves stories to live … We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five … We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images.”
“One should never write down or up to people, but out of yourself.”
“A short-story writer should be brave. It’s a sad fact to acknowledge, but that’s the way it is.”
Walter’s Law
Play!
Reading tips
Georges Simenon, Dirty Snow
Albert Camus, The Stranger
Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse
Joan Didion, The White Album
Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude
William Kennedy, Ironweed