Paul Jessup

I’m sick of talking about business. I’m sick of people in genre, or self-published authors, or what have you only going on and on about how to get X or how to make Y or money money money or “you need to write steampunk! urban fantasy! vampire sex! monkey romance!” or any of that. I’m … Continue reading »

Been thinking about Natural Born Killers. It was considered so edgy at the time, but even then I felt meh towards it. It was too forced into stylish excess, it didn’t have substance beyond the exploitative cinema heart beating at its core. The problem with NBK, as well as American Psycho (both book and movie) is that … Continue reading »

He used to tell his students that “the whole history of literary fiction as an evolutionary process may be said to be a gradual probing of deeper and deeper layers of life. … The artist, like the scientist, in the process of evolution of art and science, is always casting around, understanding a little more … Continue reading »

Everyone talks about beginnings when they blog in their writery blogs. They list favorite starts, favorite first sentence, they quote them, they write them on bones and throw them down and look for the future amongst them. I say meh to that. Endings are trickier. Endings are loopier. Here are some of my favorite endings- “Where I … Continue reading »

http://www.newyorker.com/online/2011/09/05/110905on_audio_murakami

This is going with the post I put up yesterday- with DeLillo talking about how all plots (narrative, etc) end in death and make conspirators of the readers. It’s an interesting idea, and I think it’s a very Western idea, steeped in our culture that has reduced all stories to variations of Freytag’s Pyramid, the Monomyth (thank … Continue reading »

Whenever I write a novel, I have a strong sense that I am doing something I was unable to do before. With each new work, I move up a step and discover something new inside me. I don’t see this novel as a departure, but I do think it has been a major step in … Continue reading »

“Not solely. You’ve read Raymond Chandler, of course. His books don’t really offer conclusions. He might say, He is the killer, but it doesn’t matter to me who did it. There was a very interesting episode when Howard Hawks made a picture of The Big Sleep. Hawks couldn’t understand who killed the chauffeur, so he called … Continue reading »

I don’t like the realistic style, myself. I prefer a more surrealistic style. from- http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/2/the-art-of-fiction-no-182-haruki-murakami#.TjzWV8Pgfy5.twitter

Make it more like a murder mystery. What murdered the boy I was? See? Write it backwards. http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/aug/28/genius-basement-alexander-masters-review