A Quote by John Tesh
If you want to write the next great novel, but you think, No, this won't work because no one will buy it or it won't be any good, then you talk yourself out of taking a risk.
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If you want a television, you go out and work for it and you buy it. If you want to learn about Aztec pottery, you take a course. But the relationship with God requires the active and passionate participation of you, yourself. You have to risk it. You have to abandon yourself to it. You have to leap into the fire. Nobody will do it for you; nobody can do it for you.
It's just the garbage in/garbage out trick. If you're not taking any fiction in, good or bad, then how can you be spitting any back out (good or bad)? I can't even imagine trying to write without reading. Really, I can hardly write a novel at all if I'm not reading just book after book.
I think I'm succinct to the point of trying to write the two-word novel. Editing my work almost never means taking anything out but rather adding, because I'm always stripping down. I tend to under-write rather than over-write.
I think it's a great time to put out quality work, and it will speak for itself. You don't have to work so hard at being successful at it, because it is something that people want, so when they want it and it is good, then they're going to get it and continue to give it to other people.
I don't even think any stimulants really help writing. You talk to most guys and they say, "Hey. I wrote this." And they're out of their head or they had a few beers or a bottle of whiskey. You wake up the next morning, it's usually pretty crap. But you know Dylan Thomas wrote some great poetry. Brendan Behan. You never know but ultimately I'd say you have to get up early in the morning and you're usually sober when you write your good stuff; it's hard work. So alcohol, keep it for chilling out, fun, and having a good time. Not for work.
The risk of working with people you don't respect; the risk of working for a company whose values are incosistent with your own; the risk of compromising what's important; the risk of doing something that fails to express-or even contradicts--who you are. And then there is the most dangerous risk of all--the risk of spending your life not doing what you want on the bet that you can buy yourself the freedom to do it later.
When I sit down to write, I don't think, 'OK, what is the next David O. Russell film I can write, or what is Harvey Weinstein going to want to buy?' Or even, 'What are filmgoers going to want.' I try to think, tell a good story. Just do what you do.
Priyanka and Red One made a great record that we think will stand on its own. People won't buy the music just because she is who she is. We want them to buy it because it's good.
These motivational tapes have really inspired me! I'm going to make a million dollars, buy my own company and retire early. Then, I'm going to write a novel and a symphony and give all the profits to charity. Then next month, I'll figure out how to do it.
It's very bad to write a novel by act of will. I can do a book of nonfiction work that way - just sign the contract and do the book because, provided the topic has some meaning for me, I know I can do it. But a novel is different. A novel is more like falling in love. You don't say, 'I'm going to fall in love next Tuesday, I'm going to begin my novel.' The novel has to come to you. It has to feel just like love.
I always think it's silly when people talk about works of culture taking risks. Because there's not any risk involved.
No writer, I believe, should attempt a novel before he is thirty, and not then unless he has been hopelessly and helplessly involved in life. For the writer who goes out to find material for a novel, as a fishermen goes out to sea to fish, will certainly not write a good novel. Life has to be lived thoughtlessly, unconsciously, at full tilt and for no purpose except its own sake before it becomes, eventually, good material for a novel.
The more readings a novel has, even contradictory, the better. In journalism, you talk about what you know; you have provided yourself with records, you have gathered information, you have performed interviews. In a novel, you talk about what you don't know, because the novel comes from the unconscious. They are very different relationships with words and with the world. In journalism, you talk about trees; in the novel, you try to talk about the forest.
At one point I would read nothing that was not by the great American Jews - Saul Bellow, Philip Roth - which had a disastrous effect of making me think I needed to write the next great Jewish American novel. As a ginger-haired child in the West of Ireland, that didn't work out very well, as you can imagine.
You want to be confident when you work out because it takes a lot to make you work out. So many women really enjoy it, but it's a hard thing and you have to make yourself do it most of the time. I think you want to feel that you look good to make you want to work out a little bit more.
I'm a terrible sentence finisher. I think that's why I'm a songwriter. When you write a song, there are no rules, and I think that I talk as if there are no rules. But then I run this great risk of no one understanding me at all.
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