Wilder on Writing: A Dose of Reality

Here's a nice little interview in which Billy Wilder flies a box kite and tells people once and for all that creative writing is goddamned hard work like any other kind of work. I was talking to a new friend, a scientist, about writing fiction last week and he said it must be liberating, his implication being that you're limited only by your imagination. The problem is that being limited only by your imagination is quite sufficient to make fiction writing a long day at the office. You imagine all kinds of things, and most of them are crap that won't ring true to anyone. (And let's not forget that you have to vividly describe the things that will ring true.) Writing and revising fiction is bastardly hard work. Period.

And that's mostly what's on tap today—got an introductory chapter to do a fourth revision on and a critiquing group session tonight. Anyway, here's Wilder and his writing partner I.A.L. Diamond: