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Scott Timberg on Creative Destruction

David Mitchell’s “The Bone Clocks”

October 5, 2014 by Scott Timberg

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I’M not sure there’s a novelist alive whose work I look forward to more than David Mitchell’s. I say this even while sharing some mixed feelings about his new novel. The parts of this that work — four and a half of its six parts — are simply spectacular. In fact, I can’t think of two many writers of any kind whose storytelling is so rich and engaging. The guy is simply unbelievable.

In any case, I spoke to him recently — asking him to describe his creative process and to address his critics — and led off my interview this way.

I just finished “The Bone Clocks,” and I’m thinking about your storytelling. You seem like the kind of jazz musician who can go up and play chorus after chorus after chorus without breaking a sweat. Is storytelling easy for you? It seems to be like a melody that just keeps unfolding.20819685

Oh, thank you. Bless you. I sweat. I think all jazz saxophonists do. It’s also my job to conceal the fact that I’m sweating, and for that to be gone by the time it reaches the reader. So yeah, I go wrong and I go down blind alleys and bark at trees and follow red herrings. But I have to fix what goes wrong and rewrite and disassemble and re-assemble so that by the time it reaches your hands, it looks effortless. But no, it isn’t.

Regarding reviews of The Bone Clocks, my point of view is close to Pico Iyer’s in the New York Times Book Review, with a bit of Laura Miller’s Salon take mixed in. (Unlike Laura, I did not think one hysterical section was enough to ruin the entire novel.) Even with the slight stumble, I can’t wait to see what he comes up with next.

Filed Under: Arthur C. Clarke, books, brit culture, fantasy, Laura Miller, literary, science-fiction

Scott Timberg

I'm a longtime culture writer and editor based in Los Angeles; my book "CULTURE CRASH: The Killing of the Creative Class" came out in 2015. My stories have appeared in The New York Times, Salon and Los Angeles magazine, and I was an LA Times staff writer for six years. I'm also an enthusiastic if middling jazz and indie-rock guitarist. (Photo by Sara Scribner) Read More…

Culture Crash, the Book

My book came out in 2015, and won the National Arts & Entertainment Journalism Award. The New Yorker called it "a quietly radical rethinking of the very nature of art in modern life"

I urge you to buy it at your favorite independent bookstore or order it from Portland's Powell's.

Culture Crash

Here is some information on my book, which Yale University Press published in 2015. (Buy it from Powell's, here.) Some advance praise: With coolness and equanimity, Scott Timberg tells what in less-skilled hands could have been an overwrought horror story: the end of culture as we have known … [Read More...]

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