To write your next novel, you must forget your last one

21 January 2022

Sara Freeman, writing for Granta Magazine, with some sage advice for authors embarking on the writing of their next novel, to write your next novel, you must forget your last one:

There’s a kind of necessary amnesia that sets in after you finish writing a novel. Like childbirth, you must forget; the future requires it of you. If you remembered, really remembered, then surely you wouldn’t do it again. Or perhaps it’s that the experience itself of writing a novel is a kind of sustained forgetting, a controlled fugue.