“Doesn’t it seem to you,” asked Madame Bovary, “that the mind moves more freely in the presence of that boundless expanse, that the sight of it elevates the soul and gives rise to thoughts of the infinite and the ideal?” GUSTAVE FLAUBERT, Madame Bovary (1857)
Painting: “Young Woman at the Window, Sunset” by Henry Matisse (1921)
“Literature…is just entertainment like rock’n’roll or a film. It is entertainment. If it doesn’t capture you on that level, as entertainment, movement of plot, then it doesn’t work. Nothing else will come out of it. The beauty of the language, the characterization, the structure, all that’s irrelevant if you’re not getting the reader on that level — moving a story.” T.C. BOYLE, novelist and short story writer
“Amateurs sit and wait for inspiration, the rest of us just get up and go to work.” STEPHEN KING
“I write when I’m inspired, and I see to it that I’m inspired at nine o’clock every morning.” PETER DE VRIES
“You can’t wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.” JACK LONDON
Painting: “Lightning” by Kevin Gritzke
April 30, 2013 marks the 68th birthday of Annie Dillard, best known as the author of PILGRIM AT TINKER CREEK, which won the 1975 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction. Dillard spent decades as a creative writing professor — and captured many of her insights in THE WRITING LIFE, a collection of short essays published in 1990.
Here are some excerpts from what I consider one of the best books about writing — for its insider tips, advice, inspiration, and motivation…
“One of the things I know about writing is this: spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book or for another book; give it, give it all, give it now. The impulse to save something good for a better place later is the signal to spend it now. Something more will arise for later, something better.”
“A work in progress quickly becomes feral. It reverts to a wild state overnight. It is barely domesticated, a mustang on which you one day fastened a halter, but which now you cannot catch. It is a lion you cage in your study. As the work grows, it gets harder to control; it is a lion growing in strength. You must visit it every day and reassert your mastery over it. If you skip a day, you are, quite rightly, afraid to open the door to its room. You enter its room with bravura, holding a chair at the thing and shouting, ‘Simba!’”
“There is neither a proportional relationship, nor an inverse one, between a writer’s estimation of a work in progress & its actual quality. The feeling that the work is magnificent, & the feeling that it is abominable, are both mosquitoes to be repelled, ignored, or killed, but not indulged.”
THE WRITING LIFE is available at Amazon.com.
“Writing is something that you don’t know how to do. You sit down and it’s something that happens, or it may not happen. So, how can you teach anybody how to write? It’s beyond me, because you yourself don’t even know if you’re going to be able to…Sometimes I’ll sit at that typewriter for fifteen minutes, you know. I don’t go up there to write. The typewriter’s up there. If it doesn’t start moving, I say, well this could be the night that I hit the dust.” CHARLES BUKOWSKI
Illustration: Portrait of Charles Bukowski by Bradley Wind
“Once a novel gets going and I know it is viable, I don’t then worry about plot or themes. These things will come in almost automatically because the characters are now pulling the story.” CHINUA ACHEBE, author of THINGS FALL APART
Nigerian novelist, poet, professor, and critic Chinua Achebe passed away on March 21, 2013 at age 82. He is best known for his first novel, Things Fall Apart (1958) — the most widely read book in modern African literature, and one of the first African novels written in English. Set in pre-colonial Nigeria in the 1890s, the book tells of the clash between colonialism and traditional Nigerian culture. (Source: Wikipedia)
From the book: “A man who calls his kinsmen to a feast does not do so to save them from starving. They all have food in their own homes. When we gather together in the moonlit village ground it is not because of the moon. Every man can see it in his own compound. We come together because it is good for kinsmen to do so.”
“For me, writing a novel is like having a dream. Writing a novel lets me intentionally dream while I’m still awake. I can continue yesterday’s dream today, something you can’t normally do in everyday life.” HARUKI MURAKAMI, author of THE WIND-UP BIRD CHRONICLE
FROM THE AMAZON.COM LISTING FOR THE WIND-UP BIRD CHRONICLE: Haruki Murakami is a master of subtly disturbing prose. Mundane events throb with menace, while the bizarre is accepted without comment. Meaning always seems to be just out of reach, for the reader as well as for the characters, yet one is drawn inexorably into a mystery that may have no solution. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is an extended meditation on themes that appear throughout Murakami’s earlier work. The tropes of popular culture, movies, music, detective stories, combine to create a work that explores both the surface and the hidden depths of Japanese society at the end of the 20th century.
###
Editor’s Note: At 607 pages, a long read, but never boring — and one of my all-time favorite novels.
Illustration: Portrait of Haruki Murakami by Bradley Wind
“The writing of a novel is taking life as it already exists, not to report it but to make an object, toward the end that the finished work might contain this life inside it and offer it to the reader. The essence will not be, of course, the same thing as the raw material; it is not even of the same family of things. The novel is something that never was before and will not be again.” EUDORA WELTY (1909-2001)
April 13, 2013 marked the 104th anniversary of the birth of author and photographer Eudora Welty who lived a long and productive life, passing away in 2001 at age 92. Welty spent most of her years in her native Jackson, Mississippi, where she wrote novels and short stories in the bedroom of her family home.
According to the Eudora Welty House website, her writing routine was to start early and write as long as she could, pausing briefly at noon for a light lunch. She viewed writing as joyful work and summer was her favorite time to write — because the neighborhood was especially quiet, with people staying indoors to avoid the Mississippi heat. Her home is a National Historic Landmark and open to the public as a museum.
The photo of Welty at the top of this post shows the author In the editing phase of her work, when she would place manuscript pages on her bed, cutting and pinning passages together with sewing pins. Later she used rubber cement. (We sometimes forget what writers went through in pre-computer times — when cut and paste was exactly that.)
Eudora Welty was also a gifted photographer — find out more in this Smithsonian article — and one of the most decorated of American authors. Her awards and honors include the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction (The Optimist’s Daughter, 1973), the Presidential Medal of Freedom (1980), the National Book Award (Collected Works of Eudora Welty, 1983), numerous O.Henry Awards for her short stories, the National Medal of Arts (1986), designation as Chevalier de la Légion d’honneur by the government of France, and many other forms of recognition for her gifts as an author.
Find her most renowned novel, The Optimist’s Daughter, at Amazon.com, where used hardcover copies are available for as low as one cent!
“I don’t have a name and I don’t have a plot. I have the typewriter and I have white paper and I have me, and that should add up to a novel.”
WILLIAM SAROYAN, when asked the name of his next book.
###
William Saroyan (1908-1981) was an American writer of Armenian descent who grew up in the Fresno, California, area, where many of his stories (plays, novels, short stories) take place. He is best known for his play The Time of Your Life — winner of the 1940 Pulitizer Prize — and his novel The Human Comedy (1943). Saroyan enjoyed a long and prolific career — and was the author of over 25 books, around 30 plays, and numerous short stories. In 1943, he won an Oscar for Best Story for the film version of his novel The Human Comedy.
Getting back to the Saroyan quote at the top of this post…this was one writer who could feel confident when he sat down with a typewriter and white paper that he could come up with a story — he had lots of practice doing just that.
PHOTO: William Saroyan and typewriter, awaiting the arrival of some white paper.
“When you write a story, you’re telling yourself the story…When you rewrite, your main job is taking out all the things that are not the story.” STEPHEN KING
Photo: Stephen King (born 1947) circa 1970. King’s first novel, CARRIE, was published in 1973, when he was 26.
Silver Birch Press 