Christina Baker Kline’s thoughtful blog recently featured a lovely guest post from writer Justin Kramon. He described the trouble he had with his first novel. He diagnosed his problem as wanting to be a great writer. Reading the great writers, the important writers, he says, “made me feel like a slow runner in sixth-grade gym, sweating and hyperventalating while everyone else rushed by. They were doing something I could never do, that I wasn’t built to do.”
So he went back and made a list of the writers he loved, writers like John Irving, Charles Dickens, and Alice Adams. (Alice Adams! Gone but not forgotten.)
Kramon writes: “Part of the process of becoming a writer has been acknowledging my own limitations, the things I don’t know about. And also being honest: about what I like, what I enjoy, what moves me.” Good things to think about.