This was the weekend of ReaderCon. Matthew Cheney has two posts summarizing his trip. I thought this bit from the day two summary was interesting:

Jonathan Lethem said that he read a western story by Theodore Sturgeon that, in the first half, was a beautiful Sturgeon story, and then in the second half was also a beautiful Sturgeon story, but a different one, and the experience of reading this story then made him want to write a western that was more unified but still beautiful, and this impulse was enough to get him thinking about something new to write [I forget what he said it was came out of this -- maybe one of the stories in his first collection]. Writing, he said, comes from an urge to write something like someone else who inspired you, or to fix something that you read by someone else. Writers can be perceived by readers as switching genres or styles, but this is usually the result of a bodily feeling, where at some point the writer stops absorbing and starts emitting. Kit Reed responded by saying that writers often write best when they try to create what they most want to read.

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Posted by John DeNardo at Sunday July 10, 2005 at 7:40 PM
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