<![CDATA[Nobel Laureate Doris Lessing's Advice to Young Writers: "Don't Assume You'll Have It Forever" - Gawker Comments]]> <![CDATA[Nobel Laureate Doris Lessing's Advice to Young Writers: "Don't Assume You'll Have It Forever" - Gawker Comments]]> <![CDATA[Nobel Laureate Doris Lessing's Advice to Young Writers: "Don't Assume You'll Have It Forever"]]> @heartbreakturnip: I agree, Turnip. I've never really gotten the snarking on real writers vibe hereabouts, other than as a function of anonymity.

Mediahohoho

]]> <![CDATA[Nobel Laureate Doris Lessing's Advice to Young Writers: "Don't Assume You'll Have It Forever"]]> @AuntPenny: You are high if you think Philip Roth hasn't had "it" in a long time. Here is a sample of just the great books he's written in the last fifteen years since he turned sixty. I'm leaving off the merely good and merely excellent books -- four others -- he's also published in those fifteen years.)

American Pastoral -- Pulitzer Prize
I Married a Communist -- Heartbreakturnip Award for Fucking Awesomeness
The Human Stain -- Pen/Faulkner Award
Operation Shylock -- Pen/Faulkner Award
Sabbath's Theater -- National Book Award
Everyman -- Pen/Faulkner Award

How many books have you published these last fifteen years, sweetheart?

heartbreakturnip

]]> <![CDATA[Nobel Laureate Doris Lessing's Advice to Young Writers: "Don't Assume You'll Have It Forever"]]> @KillNewYork. I'm 49, and it just gets worse.
@InOtherNews: I like the part about Brooklyn, but I suggest it's Berkeley these days.
I'd like to think Dame Doris is warning the young hotshots...like the one whose novel I just read, where his clearly autobiographical character is complaining about a meager $35 K advance.
I think there comes a time in anyone's life--artist or technocrat--where they start to value the evenings and weekends more than what goes on during the working day.

regisgoat

]]> <![CDATA[Nobel Laureate Doris Lessing's Advice to Young Writers: "Don't Assume You'll Have It Forever"]]> True for the sciences too. That's why John Nash was in a rush in his 20s.

backseat_driver10023

]]> <![CDATA[Nobel Laureate Doris Lessing's Advice to Young Writers: "Don't Assume You'll Have It Forever"]]> Is this true? But I'm so fucking tired now. At 35.
Christ.

KillNewYork

]]> <![CDATA[Nobel Laureate Doris Lessing's Advice to Young Writers: "Don't Assume You'll Have It Forever"]]> @rightbrain: I think it's pretty decent advice. I'm not a writer, but it's the advice that I'd give to young'uns in my field. I know that when I really "had it" I took the flow of things totally for granted. Now every day is like a full life cycle, and it's getting worse with every change of the season. So I'm actually trying desperately to get myself to take this advice. The "No Longer An Option" sign keeps popping up in the rear-view mirror.

But really, the reason I give this advice to young'uns is because they are my direct competition and it gives me great pleasure to see their bored, uncomprehending faces staring back at me, not getting it, and know that they're gonna fuck it up just as badly as I did, if not worse.

Zorica

]]> <![CDATA[Nobel Laureate Doris Lessing's Advice to Young Writers: "Don't Assume You'll Have It Forever"]]> I haven't read any of her works, but I thought she was great as the Mom in John Ford's Grapes of Wrath.

dango

]]> <![CDATA[Nobel Laureate Doris Lessing's Advice to Young Writers: "Don't Assume You'll Have It Forever"]]> @Conbon: "Plug hole" is a Britishism, if that's what's riling you.

BeRightBack

]]> <![CDATA[Nobel Laureate Doris Lessing's Advice to Young Writers: "Don't Assume You'll Have It Forever"]]> @rightbrain: And that's because people die. Talent doesn't.

rightbrain

]]> <![CDATA[Nobel Laureate Doris Lessing's Advice to Young Writers: "Don't Assume You'll Have It Forever"]]> This is not a advice. No decent writer worth his/her slat assumes anything will last forever.

rightbrain

]]> <![CDATA[Nobel Laureate Doris Lessing's Advice to Young Writers: "Don't Assume You'll Have It Forever"]]> You hear that Mr. Kunkel?

FracturedAcetabulum

]]> <![CDATA[Nobel Laureate Doris Lessing's Advice to Young Writers: "Don't Assume You'll Have It Forever"]]> It's kind of like the movie Rookie of the Year, where Henry Roengartner slips on the baseball and can suddenly throw 100+ mph, but then later, he slips on ball again (seriously? I mean come on...that's two more times than I've slipped on a baseball in my whole life) and it slides away like water down a plug hole and then he has to use the hidden ball trick and an underhand floater to finish the game and simultaneously teach us all a lesson.

...I'm still waiting to slip on the "baseball" that will let me write well...or throw 100+ mph.

FitnessMadeSimple

]]> <![CDATA[Nobel Laureate Doris Lessing's Advice to Young Writers: "Don't Assume You'll Have It Forever"]]> Her opera "...Representative from Planet 8" was pretty bad. But, I blame Phillip Glass.

miss_msry

]]> <![CDATA[Nobel Laureate Doris Lessing's Advice to Young Writers: "Don't Assume You'll Have It Forever"]]> Lessing needs to say this to Philip Roth, John Updike, and Woody Allen, who have not had "it" in a long long time. I'd add Saul Bellow to that list, but he's dead, so. These things have a way of working themselves out sometimes.

AuntPenny

]]> <![CDATA[Nobel Laureate Doris Lessing's Advice to Young Writers: "Don't Assume You'll Have It Forever"]]> Yep, just ask Jewel -- one book of poems, then the talent escaped her.

Chaim Gnadelstein

]]> <![CDATA[Nobel Laureate Doris Lessing's Advice to Young Writers: "Don't Assume You'll Have It Forever"]]>

+ Watch video

Awards are gay

Gayyker

]]> <![CDATA[Nobel Laureate Doris Lessing's Advice to Young Writers: "Don't Assume You'll Have It Forever"]]> @SneakingThroughTheAlleyWithLalley...: Judge for yourself. Personally, I think "To Room Nineteen" is one of the better short stories I've read.

[www.dorislessing.org]

Mediahohoho

]]> <![CDATA[Nobel Laureate Doris Lessing's Advice to Young Writers: "Don't Assume You'll Have It Forever"]]> "Use it while you've got it; because it'll go." Someone needs to introduce Doris' boy-toy to a little magic pill called Viagra.

MrInBetween

]]> <![CDATA[Nobel Laureate Doris Lessing's Advice to Young Writers: "Don't Assume You'll Have It Forever"]]> When reached for comment, John McCain said, "Not now. I'm napping."

Conbon

]]> <![CDATA[Nobel Laureate Doris Lessing's Advice to Young Writers: "Don't Assume You'll Have It Forever"]]> I suspect that being 88 may have something to do with her lack of energy as well.

sassypants

]]> <![CDATA[Nobel Laureate Doris Lessing's Advice to Young Writers: "Don't Assume You'll Have It Forever"]]> actually I think it was perhaps more moronic not grasping the difference between "i'll" & "all."

"All" blame Monday.

SneakingThroughTheAlleyWithLalley

]]> <![CDATA[Nobel Laureate Doris Lessing's Advice to Young Writers: "Don't Assume You'll Have It Forever"]]> "Like water down a plug hole" kind of aptly proves her point, but not in the way she intended.

Conbon

]]> <![CDATA[Nobel Laureate Doris Lessing's Advice to Young Writers: "Don't Assume You'll Have It Forever"]]> If you listen carefully, you can just make out the ghostly voice of Ralph Ellison: "Now you tell me."

SidAndFinancy

]]> <![CDATA[Nobel Laureate Doris Lessing's Advice to Young Writers: "Don't Assume You'll Have It Forever"]]> I'm sure all come off sounding like a moron here, but has anyone read her? I know I havent & I dont know many (er, any) that have/do.

SneakingThroughTheAlleyWithLalley

]]> <![CDATA[Nobel Laureate Doris Lessing's Advice to Young Writers: "Don't Assume You'll Have It Forever"]]> @EpponneeRae: This is also possible. What are we talking about?

CodePink

]]> <![CDATA[Nobel Laureate Doris Lessing's Advice to Young Writers: "Don't Assume You'll Have It Forever"]]> I can never read anything on the internet again.

Koreanish

]]> <![CDATA[Nobel Laureate Doris Lessing's Advice to Young Writers: "Don't Assume You'll Have It Forever"]]> @CodePink: Or perhaps she eats too much soy. Soy's gay too, and gives you cancer.

MattGaymon

]]> <![CDATA[Nobel Laureate Doris Lessing's Advice to Young Writers: "Don't Assume You'll Have It Forever"]]> Fortunately for her she was able to pump out about sixteen trillion books before the well dried up. You could do worse...

Private Hangnail

]]> <![CDATA[Nobel Laureate Doris Lessing's Advice to Young Writers: "Don't Assume You'll Have It Forever"]]> "But if you absolutely MUST have energy, spritz some Red Bull onto your forehead, do a line of coke, and take a pen and pad onto the ledge of a nearby three-story townhouse in Prospect Heights. Inhale the whimsy of Brooklyn, write the great American novel, buy a horse and spread manure all over the Great Lawn in Central Park. It works every time!"

In Other News...

]]> <![CDATA[Nobel Laureate Doris Lessing's Advice to Young Writers: "Don't Assume You'll Have It Forever"]]> @CodePink: Or to have a nice apartment. Or a constant supply of cans of Diet Coke. This is the shit I expect to be judged on when my life is through: accessories. Not my WRITING. Writing's gay.

CodePink

]]> <![CDATA[Nobel Laureate Doris Lessing's Advice to Young Writers: "Don't Assume You'll Have It Forever"]]> Truman Capote would have something to say about this.

HamptonShmampton

]]> <![CDATA[Nobel Laureate Doris Lessing's Advice to Young Writers: "Don't Assume You'll Have It Forever"]]> I think Hemingway would agree with her.

IndianSlipper

]]> <![CDATA[Nobel Laureate Doris Lessing's Advice to Young Writers: "Don't Assume You'll Have It Forever"]]> Yeah, that's why it's important to always be pretty.

CodePink

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