Dan Wang: belief

Transcript context

…How did you learn how to write so well? I have always grown up loving to read. My grandfather bought so many books for me, first picture books that had text underneath. Then, my mother also encouraged a reading habit. We had so many books growing up. I think that if I were thinking about writing, first and foremost, I pay attention to cadences. I think about beat. I think about the musicality of the effect. I think that it is really, really valuable to just have a sense of how the words sound before it falls out of your pen. I have a sense of practice. When I was a musician, every so often I would take some time when I was still a college student to just go to the music library, check out some scores. I did this with a Mahler symphony as well as some Mozart symphonies, to just simply copy out the scores, and just write it all out. I did this exercise also when I was early in my writing. I would just take a New Yorker article that I really liked, and simply rewrite the entire thing. When you engage in that sort of exercise, you really have a sense of what the composer was thinking when he was plotting out the harmonies. When you do that with a really good piece of writing, whether that’s a New Yorker article, or a really good book, you start having a sense of the choices that the author was making in terms of syntax, in terms of sentence length, in terms of the word choices, and being in a position to make those sorts of choices, I think, is very valuable. Why is Stendhal your favorite novelist?…

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