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Category: Ephemera
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A Toy and an Amusement
Writing a book is an adventure. To begin with, it is a toy and an amusement; then it becomes a mistress, and then it becomes a master, and then a tyrant. The last phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster, and fling him out to the public.
~Winston Churchill -
Claire Messud on ambition
Here’s a good interview with Claire Messud, author of The Emperor’s Children, on the Kenyon Review blog.
So is ambition ever justified? There’s always something insane about it, there’s something always unjustifiable about it. But what would ever get done without it?
Nanomo Writing Exercise:
Write a story that is propelled in part by a character’s blind ambition. -
John Gardner on detail
“In addition to watching the rhythm of his scene–the tempo or pace–the writer pays close attention, in constructing the scene, to the relationship, in each of its elements, of emphasis and function. By emphasis we mean the amount of time spent on a particular detail; by function we mean the work done by the detail within the scene and the story as a whole.” John Gardner, The Art of Fiction
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graham greene on the importance of superficiality
“So much in writing depends on the superficiality of one’s days. One may be preoccupied with shopping and income tax returns and chance conversations, but the stream of the unconscious continues to flow undisturbed, solving problems, planning ahead: one sits down sterile and dispirited at the desk, and suddenly the words come as though from the air: the situations that seemed blocked in a hopeless impasse move forward: the work has been done while one slept or shopped or talked with friends.”
~Graham Greene, The End of the Affair -
selection: the memoirist’s dilemma
“…a detective must find it as important as a novelist to amass his trivial material before picking out the right clue. But how difficult that picking out is–the release of the real subject…Now that I come to write my own story the problem is still the same, but worse–there are so many more facts, now that I have not to invent them.” ~Graham Greene, The End of the Affair
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What We Are Doing
What then shall I do this morning? How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing. ~Annie Dillard, The Writing Life
Of course it is a rather stupid thing to spend one’s morning reading a book about writing instead of writing the book one is supposed to be writing, the book that has been paid for, the book that a very kind and conscientious editor is waiting for, kindly and conscientiously but possibly inpatiently, because she has every right to be impatient at this point. But a good book is such a temptation! It is not unlike truffles from Joseph Schmidt or men with beautiful backs. It is a terribly difficult thing to resist! But it must be resisted. It must be put aside. One must return to the work at hand, this book of one’s own, this thing that has sucked up four years of one’s life, not consecutively but spottily, in fits and starts, a few weeks here, a few months there, with long intervals in between for things like babies and husbands and trips to far-off lands, sex and pilates and Scotch, movies and more movies and books and books and books.
Another writer told me recently that when she is in the throes of writing, when she is truly inspired, when the words are just coming, flowing forth, that it is “better than sex.” I have not found this to be true.
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Borges on enchantment
I have read almost all of Croce, and though I am not always in agreement with him, I am enchanted by him. Enchantment, as Stevenson said, is one of the special qualities a writer must have. Without enchantment, the rest is useless.
~from “The Divine Comedy,” the first lecture in Seven Nights
I love what Borges says here, by way of Stevenson. As authors we try so hard to enchant, but it is impossible to do so without being, by turns, enchanted–not only with language and narrative, but also with the complexities of human nature and the intricate mysteries of the natural world.