{"id":864,"date":"2009-04-05T17:55:00","date_gmt":"2009-04-05T17:55:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bestfantasynovel.com\/2009\/04\/05\/the-secret-to-overnight-success\/"},"modified":"2009-04-05T17:55:00","modified_gmt":"2009-04-05T17:55:00","slug":"the-secret-to-overnight-success","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/taramayastales.com\/bestfantasynovel\/2009\/04\/05\/the-secret-to-overnight-success\/","title":{"rendered":"The Secret to Overnight Success"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>
This interview with Arthur Golden, the author of Memoirs of a Geisha<\/b><\/a> is ten years old, but new to me. A friend in a writing group passed the link to me, and I pass it on to you, with these thoughts:<\/p>\n

1. This” overnight night success” took fifteen years to research, write, rewrite and sell.<\/p>\n

2. Golden wrote a complete draft before he was able to interview a real geisha. “But I wrote a draft based on a lot of book-learning. And I thought I had a pretty good idea of what the world of a geisha was like, and wrote a draft. Then a chance came along to meet a geisha, which, of course, I couldn’t turn down. And she was so helpful to me that I realized I’d gotten everything wrong, and I ended up throwing out that entire first draft and doing the whole thing over again.”<\/p>\n

3. He then rewrote the entire book again, this time changing from third person to first person.<\/p>\n

And I also found this insight to the point:<\/p>\n

O’BRIEN: What’s it like, sitting there at the computer keyboard, trying — as a white male, trying to put yourself into that skin? <\/p>\n

GOLDEN: You know, I think that it’s pretty much like writing anything else in fiction, in the sense that even if you sit down and try to imagine a story about somebody who lives on a street you’ve never seen, you really can’t escape the hard work of just bridging this divide between you and an imagined other. And the difference for me was that I had to do a lot of research to put myself in a position where I could begin to know enough about that imagined other to make that leap. But the leap, I think, is the same, really, whatever kind of fiction you’re writing.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This interview with Arthur Golden, the author of Memoirs of a Geisha is ten years old, but new to me. A friend in a writing group passed the link to me, and I pass it on to you, with these thoughts: 1. This” overnight night success” took fifteen years to research, write, rewrite and sell. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[32,136,188,263,338,426,532],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-864","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arthur-golden","category-draft","category-first-person","category-interview","category-memoirs-of-a-geisha","category-research","category-third-person"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/taramayastales.com\/bestfantasynovel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/864","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/taramayastales.com\/bestfantasynovel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/taramayastales.com\/bestfantasynovel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/taramayastales.com\/bestfantasynovel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/taramayastales.com\/bestfantasynovel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=864"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/taramayastales.com\/bestfantasynovel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/864\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/taramayastales.com\/bestfantasynovel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=864"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/taramayastales.com\/bestfantasynovel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=864"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/taramayastales.com\/bestfantasynovel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=864"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}