“It’s the plots that I find so hard to work out. It takes such a long time to work one out. I like to think of some scene, it doesn’t matter how crazy, and work backward and forward from it until eventually it becomes quite plausible and fits neatly into the story.”
“Nothing puts the reader off more than a great slab of prose at the start. I think the success of every novel—if it’s a novel of action—depends on the high spots. The thing to do is to say to yourself, “Which are my big scenes?” and then get every drop of juice out of them.”
“All this time I was writing and getting rejections. Because the trouble is when you start writing, you write awful stuff.”
– Interview with PG Wodehouse, Paris Review – The Art of Fiction No. 60, Winter 1975 (published post-mortem).
Wodehouse was 91 (“and a half”) at the time of this interview, and still writing! Read the interview here: http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/3773/the-art-of-fiction-no-60-p-g-wodehouse
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