The Struggle of Writing | Big Think

The Struggle of Writing

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Kurt Andersen discusses the struggle of writing. He says all writing is a moment-to-moment struggle to find the right words within the right structure.

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Kurt Andersen:

Kurt Andersen, host of Studio 360 on NPR, is a journalist and the author of the novels Hey Day, Turn of the Century, The Real Thing, and his latest non-fiction book Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History. He has written and produced prime-time network television programs and pilots for NBC and ABC, and co-authored Loose Lips, an off-Broadway theatrical revue that had long runs in New York and Los Angeles. He is a regular columnist for New York Magazine, and contributes frequently to Vanity Fair. He is also a founder of Very Short List.

Andersen began his career in journalism at NBC's Today program and at Time, where he was an award-winning writer on politics and criminal justice and for eight years the magazine's architecture and design critic. Returning to Time in 1993 as editor-at-large, he wrote a weekly column on culture. And from 1996 through 1999 he was a staff writer and columnist for The New Yorker. He was a co-founder of Inside.com, editorial director of Colors magazine, and editor-in-chief of both New York and Spy magazines, the latter of which he also co-founded.

From 2004 through 2008 he wrote a column called "The Imperial City" for New York (one of which is included in The Best American Magazine Writing 2008). In 2008 Forbes. com named him one of The 25 Most Influential Liberals in the U.S. Media. Anderson graduated magna cum laude from Harvard College, and is a member of the boards of trustees of the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, the Pratt Institute, and is currently Visionary in Residence at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. He lives with his family in New York City.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Kurt Andersen: But any kind of writing – non-fiction or fiction – is a struggle. It’s a very moment-to-moment struggle of figuring out where the right sentence, the right paragraph, the right page, the right structure for the larger thing. And when you’re writing a book – my two novels have been 600 odd pages – that becomes an enormous structure to try to get as right as possibleIt’s a pleasurable struggle when you’re done; but it is a struggle while it’s going on. I actually find the work of writing fiction less of a struggle, less of a stressful procedure than I do writing a 1,700-word essay. The essay, or journalism, is almost pure struggle. And then I’m only happy when I’m done. Whereas writing fiction has moments of pleasure amid the struggle while it’s going on.