“What
I hope for from a book - either one that I write or one that I read - is
transparency. I want the story to shine through. I don't want to think of the
writer.” – Anne Tyler
Author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Accidental Tourist, and the Time Magazine Book of the Year Breathing Lessons, Tyler celebrates her 81st birthday today. Still going strong, she has only recently released her 24th book, French Braid. Ever self-deprecating and low key, Tyler once said that while she was waiting for her child after school, another mother came up and asked if she’d found full-time work yet or she was still “just writing.”
Born in Minneapolis, Tyler was
raised in various parts of the country and often felt like an outsider, a
factor that she said helped make her a better writer and storyteller. Her first reminiscences of storytelling were
at age 3, when she said she’d crawl under the covers and tell herself stories
to help go to sleep. She was already writing
stories at age 7.
Although she was only “in-and-out”
of formal schools, she finished high school at age 16 and enrolled at Duke
University where she took renowned novelist and poet Reynolds Price’s first
creative writing class. Price later
described her as “frighteningly mature for 16,” "wide-eyed,” “an
outsider,” and “one of the best novelists alive in the world… almost as good a
writer at 16 as she is now.”
Besides the Pulitzer, Tyler is the
recipient of the Janet
Heidinger Kafka Prize, the Ambassador Book Award, 
the
National Book Critics Circle Award, and The Sunday Times Award for
Literary Excellence. Five of her
novels have been made into movies, including the widely acclaimed version of Accidental Tourist.
“I would advise any beginning writer to write the first drafts as if no one else will ever read them - without a thought about publication - and only in the last draft to consider how the work will look from the outside.”
Share A Writer’s Moment with friends
Writersmoment.blogspot.com
No comments:
Post a Comment