Tim Johnston Recommends...

“Not long ago, I chanced on an interview with Raymond Carver in which this early hero of mine said: ‘I think it's important that a writer change...so when I finish a book, I don’t write anything for six months.’ The statement seemed casual enough, matter of fact—minimalist, even. But after a lifetime of being told that a real writer writes every day, no matter what, its effect on me was maximal. I thought about the long unhappy period of not writing that followed a novel I’d spent two years writing—working on it every day, no matter what—only to have it go absolutely nowhere. When I finally began writing again, after far more than Carver’s six months, everything had changed—my tone, my language, my intentions, even my process. Now, rather than working on the novel every day, no matter what, I would work on it only when I knew I had the entire day to do nothing else. Which is one reason it took me six years to finish it, because there weren’t a lot of those days. But I did finish, and the novel is unlike anything I’ve written before—and I know that both of these outcomes are the result of that long period of not writing. Leading me to wonder, more or less calmly, as another day of not writing slips by: What kind of writer am I becoming now?”
—Tim Johnston, author of Descent (Algonquin Books, 2015)

Photo credit: Dave Boerger