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How Jonathan Franzen Learned to Write a Franzen Novel
To finish The Corrections, he had to kill his protagonist — and his idea of what a book should be.
This sprang from the feeling that relationships don’t fully go away when they end, something he’d been thinking about as a result of his disintegrated marriage( the entire evolution of The Corrections is about the way that a writer’s mental state when he is writing makes it to the page). Franzen didn’t think he was similarly dictating how other people should write their books, but some interpreted it that way, and felt he was calling The Shot, as Babe Ruth had, cockily predicting that his next novel would be the Great One. “The great thing about writing a novel is you work whatever, five, six, seven hours at the office and often struggling with something that will not come, or you’re tinkering with the sentences, and then the good ideas occur to me in the shower or in the middle of the night, or in the case of The Corrections, on the subway home.
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