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Writing encouragement Quoting William Stafford, from a collection of interviews and thoughts - The Answers Are Inside the Mountains We writesr endure contradictory influences that break up our lives. On the one hand we are urged to lock ourselves onto an endeavor that is essentially frivolous - that of getting published. There are those who ridicule us if we deviate in the smalled degree from the straight path toward pleasing an editor with our immediate writing project. Such a goal is unworthy of our vocation. It passes along to someone else the most central impulses of our lives, and it makes us nothing more than keys to be played by the market by the whims of editors and readers. (p. 11) Writing is more than that. The other urgency in our lives is to commit ourselves to discover, to follow out our best insights, no matter what the result may be in the market place. Says poet and teacher Nancy Willard in The Left-handed Story: Writing and the Writer's Life "Write from what you know, our first writing teachers told us. So in this book I tell stories of failures survived, dilemmas solved, books finished, editors that helped me, and writers whose work I love that inspired me. I go back to my own experience as a writer. But all writers know that the source of their work runs deeper than literary influences. Our writing teachers let us find out for ourselves what they really meant: write about any time or place or person you can imagine your way into – write from more than you know." Says the narrator in the novel The Cave by José Saramago “Some people never get beyond reading the words on the page, they don’t understand that the words are merely stepping stones placed across a fast-flowing river, and the reason they’re there is so that we can reach the farther shore, it’s the other side that matters.” (p.62) In her long essay - A Room of One's Own (1929), Virginia Woolf wrote: So long as you write what you wish to write, that is all that matters; and whether it matters for ages or only for hours, nobody can say. But to sacrifice a hair of the head of your vision, a shade of its color, in deference to some Headmaster with a silver pot in his hand or to some professor with a measuring-rod up his sleeve, is the most abject treachery, and the sacrifice of wealth and chastity, which used to be said to be the greatest of human disasters, a mere flea-bite in comparison." Garrison Keillor - On Writing...(in an interview for Northwest Airlines Magazine) “If there is a knack, I don’t really have it. Talent – I really don’t know what it is anymore, he says. “But I did have perseverance, and I think that’s more important. I did have the ability to sit in one place for a long period of time and not get bored. This is a good thing for a writer, because everything I do starts out a mess. You’d be embarrassed to have anybody look at it. And you just have to sit with it and push it around – and throw half of it out, and take the other half and mush that around a little bit. It just takes time. Most people just give up.” From Flaubert "It is a delicious thing to write, to be no longer yourself but to move in an entire universe of your own creating. Today, for instance, as a man and woman, both lover and mistress, I rode in a forest on an autumn afternoon under the yellow leaves, and I was also the horse, the leaves, the wind, the words that my people uttered, even the red sun that made them almost close their love-drowned eyes." From Milan Kundera - quoting Proust on meaning of the art of the novel… “Every reader, as he reads, is actually the reader of himself. The writer’s work is only a kind of optical instrument he provides the reader so he can discern what he might never have seen in himself without his book. The reader’s recognition in himself of what the book says is the proof of the book’s truth.” The New Yorker, October 9, 2006 “What is a novelist?” From Peter Elbow "People often lack any voice at all because they stop so often in the act of writing a sentence and worry and change their minds about which words to use. They have none of the natural breath in their writing that they have in speaking." From Elie Wiesel “Writing is more like a scupture where you remove, you eliminate in order to make the work visible. Even those pages you remove somehow remain.” From Pat Schneider, Writing Alone and with Others: “No one has seen the night sky from exactly your tragectory. No one has loved exactly the people and places you have loved. Who will tell that part of the earth’s story if you do not?” From Annie Dillard’s The Writing Life: “Write as if you were dying. At the same time, assume you write for an audience consisting solely of terminal patients. That is, after all, the case. What would you begin writing if you knew you would die soon? What could you say to a dying person that would not enrage by its triviallity?” And one more from Annie Dillard “One of the few 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. Give it give it all, give it now. Something more will arise fo later, something better. These things fill from behind, from beneath, like well water.” This from Willa Cather: “What was any art but an effort to make a sheath, a mold in which to imprison for a moment the shining, elusive element which is life itself — life hurrying past us and running away, too strong to stop, too sweet to lose.” For those of you writing memoirs: “The longing to tell one’s story and the prccess of telling is symbolically a gesture of longing to recover the past in such a way that one experiences both a sense of reunion and a sense of release.” bell hooks (as cited in Marry Your Muse by Jan Phillips p 29) From Ted Kooser: “You sit with your notebook, and after a while something begins to interest you. The poet William Stafford described it as being like fishing: you throw out your line and wait for a little tug. Maybe all you get is a minnow, three or four words that seem to have a little magic, and even that can be enough to get writing started. And a minnow can be pretty good bait for bigger fish.” The Poetry Home Repair Manual p 13 . <back to list |
