Literary Birthday – 2 August – Rose Tremain

Happy Birthday, Rose Tremain, born 2 August 1943.

Rose Tremain Quotes

I suspect that many writers deceive themselves about why they write. My self-deception is that I create in order to understand and that the final end of it all might be wisdom. This means that I deliberately seek out the strange, the unfamiliar, even the unknowable, as subjects for my novels and trust my imagination to illuminate them to the point where both I and the reader can see them with a new clarity. The writers I admire most seem to have this kind of goal: to comprehend experience distant from their own, in nature, place and time, and to let the extraordinary cast new light on the quotidian. (via)
Writing is a strange synthesis between the two parts of your mind: the analytical side and the side that knows nothing at all, and you have to allow the dreaming side free rein.
There is something about the unexpected that moves us. As if the whole of existence is paid for in some way, except for that one moment, which is free.
Perhaps, all writers walk such a line. In general – as we all do in our dreams – I believe I put something of myself into all the characters in my novels, male as well as female.
A novel usually takes me two years. A year to research and plan and dream. Then a year to write.
Pace is crucial. Fine writing isn’t enough. Writing students can be great at producing a single page of well-crafted prose; what they sometimes lack is the ability to take the reader on a journey, with all the changes of terrain, speed and mood that a long journey involves. Again, I find that looking at films can help. Most novels will want to move close, linger, move back, move on, in pretty cinematic ways.
The process of rewriting is enjoyable, because you’re not in that existential panic when you don’t have a novel at all.

Read: Rose Tremain’s 10 Rules for Writers

Rose Tremain is an award-winning English author, and current Chancellor of the University of East Anglia. She won The Orange Prize for The Road Home.

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by Amanda Patterson