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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