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Meg Waite Clayton

New York Times Bestselling Author

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September 6, 2009 By Meg Waite Clayton

Natural Writers

I’m reading Graham Swift’s Making an Elephant: Writing from Within (if you’ve never read Swift, go get a copy of Last Orders this minute and do so!) and came across the following passage, which gave me great comfort:
“It was one thing — not a difficult thing — to want to be a writer; another to become one… Looking back on it, I think the truth was that I was scared of my ambition, scared of discovering that I didn’t have what it took to fulfil it.”
Hmmm … even Booker Prize winners can have doubt.
And this passage:
“I wonder now if the notion of the natural writer isn’t entirely mythical. The natural writers are just the ones who make it look natural — even Tolstoy idn’t work in an oracular trance. But when I was seventeen, turning eighteen, I certainly believed in natural writers. I thought they were the real writers. And this was perhaps the nub of my fear about my ambition: I knew I wasn’t a natural writer. If I were, I’d already be a writer; there’d be no question of becoming one. The only way I could be a writer would be by making myself one, by squeezing the writer out of me. By work.”
Inspires me to squeeze a little harder! – Meg

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Meg Waite Clayton

Meg Waite Clayton is a New York Times and internationally bestselling author of THE LAST TRAIN TO LONDON, a Jewish Book Award finalist based on the true story of the Kindertransport rescue of ten thousand children from Nazi-occupied Europe—and one brave woman who helped them escape. Her six prior novels include the Langum-Prize honored The Race for Paris and The Wednesday Sisters, one of Entertainment Weekly's 25 Essential Best Friend Novels of all time. A graduate of the University of Michigan and its law school, she has also written for the Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The San Francisco Chronicle, Forbes, Runners World, and public radio, often on the subject of the particular challenges women face. megwaiteclayton.com

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