A Writers Life - Gay Talese
By Gay Talese
C 2005
Alfred A Knopf publisher
excerpts from pages 75-76
"Often I involve myself with two or three unrelated subjects at the same time, and I shift from one to another when I become bogged down and believe it wiser to put aside what I am doing and reappraise it at some point in the future.... Thy Neighbor's Wife - one of four books that I had begun and completed between 1965-1999; but during this period I had also started several other books and had finished one of them. My curiosity drives me in different directions, but until I have invested lots of my time --- months, years--- I have no idea whether a chosen subject will sustain my interest. Sometimes I toss into the trash various drafts of what I have written, while at other times I put them aside, file them away, reread them a year or two later, rewrite and refile them perhaps, or decide that they are not worth saving after all, and so I tear them up and rid myself of them forever.
'Writing is often like driving a truck at night without headlights, losing your way along the road, and spending a decade in a ditch..."
