Get Shook Up for to Write
John Burdett, author of the acclaimed Bankok 8 and Bankok Tattoo, has just one piece of advice for young writers who hit a wall: "Shun security...Get disoriented. Maybe your agonizing writing block isn't agonizing enough. Your enemy is comfort," says Burdett in The Washington Post's The Writing Life column.
Living in Thailand while he worked on Bankok 8, Burdett says he wrote three drafts of the book, all bad. It was at that point that a bar girl he had befriended invited him to her family home in central Thailand for Songkran, a religous water festival. Living in a hut in relentless heat and humidity, getting water from a well and witnessing a partygoer's injury, lit the fuse for what finally, became the finished book.