I’ve never had any patience for people who claim their creativity controls them rather than vice versa. I have every sympathy with people who struggle to create, but if I see one more film about someone who’s spent the last two years suffering from writer’s block, I will throw something heavy at the screen.

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The Part Where I Hate The Damn Book « extribulum

Yes, exactly.

I have so little patience for talk of creative “muses” or inspiration being something outside of yourself. (As I was reminded, while listening to this podcast, and possibly startling my roommate by shouting at Elizabeth Gilbert during it.)

Just because we don’t understand every nook and cranny of the human brain doesn’t mean there’s some invisible field permeating the world that bestows ideas on some people. There are a lot of ways that ideas crop up in a brain, and I don’t claim to know what they are or how our brains work when processing ideas and stories and information.

But what you definitely don’t do is get struck with a stray idea out of nowhere and have a novel spew out of your fingertips as though you are but a bridge between an ethereal muse and the corporeal world. 

(Radiolab, episode: Help!)

So this idea that genres are merging into something and losing their distinctions, I’m now much more excited about genre distinctions. What I still see breaking down are more the hierarchical arrangements of genres. That is, “There is literary fiction, and then there are lesser genres.” I’m much more clear on the idea that literary fiction is itself a genre. It is not above other genres. It is down there in the muck with all the other genres, and it’s doing the wonderful things that it does, but to give it a Y-axis, to make it high and low, just seems absurd. I stand by that.

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Lev Grossman  | Books | Interview | The A.V. Club

Few months old, but gosh I wish this would really happen.