Writers on Writing

[Angeline]

We've had many threads about why we write or what or how. We've spent a fair amount of time talking about our individual processes and motivations. Here is a thread in which to post quotes or links to interviews or other sources (like articles, etc.) of writers talking about writing. It can be poetry but doesn't have to. You can post quotes or such from your favorite writers you'd like to share.

Perhaps these will inspire or allow you to apply the ideas to your own work.

Here, for a start is Salman Rushdie

Thirty-five Years of Discipline

 

[Angeline]

Ernest Hemingway
1958

. . . the best writing is certainly when you are in love

 

[Angeline]

Jack Kerouac
1968

I spent my entire youth writing slowly with revisions and endless rehashing, speculation and deleting and got so I was writing one sentence a day and the sentence had no FEELING. Goddamn it, FEELING is what I like in art, not CRAFTINESS and the hiding of feelings.

 

[Angeline]

Isaac Bashevis Singer
1968

I wonder what these people thought thousands of years ago of these sparks they saw when they took off their woolen clothes?


I really like this quote. I feel that it describes something similar to my motivation to write. What if? What if?

 

[Angeline]

Eudora Welty
1972

Once you're into a story everything seems to apply—what you overhear on a city bus is exactly what your character would say on the page you're writing. Wherever you go, you meet part of your story.

 

[PandoraGlitters]

I rather liked this one:

Never throw up on an editor.
- Ellen Datlow

 

[PandoraGlitters]

Ernest Hemingway
1958

. . . the best writing is certainly when you are in love

 

[Maria2394]

Jack Kerouac
1968

I spent my entire youth writing slowly with revisions and endless rehashing, speculation and deleting and got so I was writing one sentence a day and the sentence had no FEELING. Goddamn it, FEELING is what I like in art, not CRAFTINESS and the hiding of feelings.

What an incredible quote, Angeline! I tried to say that manytimes but just could not articulate what I meant. It always came out as .... over-edited, sterile, no feelings whatsoever, but you got the quote that says what I meant. awesome!

 

[UnderYourSpell]

I rather liked this one:

Never throw up on an editor.
- Ellen Datlow

I'm spending far too much time on Facebook you have me searching for the 'Like' button again

 

[PandoraGlitters]

Ooof! I have been on Facebook too much lately, myself, Annie, playing online Scrabble. It was there that I saw this quote (which isn't quite on topic, but funny anyway).

"When I die, I want to die peacefully in my sleep, like my grandfather. Not screaming like the other passengers in his car." - Will Rogers

 

[Tzara]

I wish our clever young poets would remember my homely definitions of prose and poetry; that is, prose,—words in their best order; poetry,—the best words in their best order.
—Samuel Taylor Coleridge

 

[Angeline]

Thank you poets for keeping this thread alive thus far. I'm going to bump it with new material when I find things of interest and I hope you will, too. You never know where you'll next find some inspiration, right?

Maria, I love that Kerouac quote, too (obviously lol I love any quote that I'd choose to post somewhere), but I think I was especially moved by Singer's quote that suggests art comes out of trying to find explanations for what happens to us. I also love the Eudora Welty line: that your story is always all around you. Who doesn't steal (or whatever one calls it) from everything going on around them? Doesn't everyone use everything they can?

Btw, one of the side benefits of this thread for me was that in searching for quotes I found terrific interviews with writers (going back to the 1950s), some poets, in the Esquire archives online.

 

[UnderYourSpell]

Ooof! I have been on Facebook too much lately, myself, Annie, playing online Scrabble. It was there that I saw this quote (which isn't quite on topic, but funny anyway).

"When I die, I want to die peacefully in my sleep, like my grandfather. Not screaming like the other passengers in his car." - Will Rogers

I think you once told me who you are on Facebook but I never did manage to find you

 

[Tzara]

This is the quote that I think greenmountaineer referenced the other day. It's usually misquoted as something like "good poets borrow; great poets steal." The actual quote (from an essay on Philip Massinger in The Sacred Wood) is:

Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different.
—T. S. Eliot

 

[Angeline]

Gore Vidal RIP

Here is a wonderful New York Times essay on Gore Vidal, an iconic figure of twentieth-century American letters and culture. Vidal died yesterday at the age of 86. His well-documented contretemps with Norman Mailer and William F Buckley, Jr. are well worth checking out on YouTube, too. Love him or hate him, he was one of a kind and led a fascinating life.

 

[GuiltyPleasure]

Vidal died yesterday at the age of 86.

Sad news inded. Maeve Binchy also died in her home in Ireland after a short illness.

LONDON—Maeve Binchy, one of Ireland’s most beloved writers, has died in Dublin after a short illness at the age of 72, Irish media reported on Tuesday.

Binchy was revered by countless fans around the world for such novels as Light a Penny Candle, Tara Road and Circle of Friends, which was adapted for the screen in 1995 starring Chris O’Donnell and Minnie Driver. She sold more than 40 million books worldwide.

Her novels and short stories often examined the friction between tradition and modern life in Ireland. Her works have been translated into 37 languages.

A review in the Toronto Star in 2000 described a Binchy book as “escapism the way it should be. You get lost in a world much like your own, yet where your own troubles are far away …. That’s probably one of the reasons millions of people around the world read Binchy: she spins heart-warming tales about ordinary characters who, somehow, manage to get things right in the end.”

Born in the Dublin suburb of Dalkey in 1940, Binchy began her career as a teacher before moving into a distinguished career as a newspaper journalist and writer.

She then moved to London, where she became the London editor of The Irish Times newspaper.

Her first novel, Light a Penny Candle, was published in 1982 and became a bestseller.

She later published dozens of novels, novellas and collections of short stories, including The Copper Beech, Silver Wedding, Evening Class and Heart and Soul.

She announced her retirement in 2000 but continued to write. Her last novel, Minding Frankie, was published in 2010. On her website, she had written: “My health isn’t so good these days and I can’t travel around to meet people the way I used to. But I’m always delighted to hear from readers, even if it takes me a while to reply.”

Binchy lived in Dalkey until her death, not far from where she grew up.

She is survived by her husband, the writer Gordon Snell.

Reading her favourite poetry

 

[PandoraGlitters]

Film buffs and Wichitans still reel from the shock of Jake Euker's death. He was a friend and a bit magical. The man who showed up the day after the party to retrieve his eye glasses from the freezer, who laughed and stirred laughter pulling surprise out of thin air. Here is a link to some of his writing. He will be missed.

 

[PandoraGlitters]

Here is an example of Jake's writing: a parody of a call in line for the Wichita Eagle Newspaper.

 

[champagne1982]

Film buffs and Wichitans still reel from the shock of Jake Euker's death. He was a friend and a bit magical. The man who showed up the day after the party to retrieve his eye glasses from the freezer, who laughed and stirred laughter pulling surprise out of thin air. Here is a link to some of his writing. He will be missed.

Blessings D. May the memories of your friend be something to celebrate throughout the rest of your life.

 

[Angeline]

Here's an interesting piece from CNN about a small group of writers or a reading tour. Would you do it?

Five States in Seven Days Bonding Over Whiskey and a Love of Writing

 

[hmmnmm]

A writer is a person for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.
Thomas Mann

This one has a way of popping up in the gray memory files just when it seems there is no hope of making anything worthwhile.

Of course the quote itself is not a magic wand but after remembering it I more easily ease up on the mental self-abuse and am able to kick the dawdling and get back into the writing for the sheer sake of the enjoyment that it should be. And is.

 

[Angeline]

A writer is a person for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.
Thomas Mann

This one has a way of popping up in the gray memory files just when it seems there is no hope of making anything worthwhile.

Of course the quote itself is not a magic wand but after remembering it I more easily ease up on the mental self-abuse and am able to kick the dawdling and get back into the writing for the sheer sake of the enjoyment that it should be. And is.

Well it's more difficult because we're trying harder, right? If I'm just sending someone a note or writing a letter, writing could not be easier, but a poem or a story is layers of work. I've been writing more stories lately and that, imho, is much harder than poetry, especially after one has spent years thinking in poetry!

 

[hmmnmm]

Well it's more difficult because we're trying harder, right? If I'm just sending someone a note or writing a letter, writing could not be easier, but a poem or a story is layers of work. I've been writing more stories lately and that, imho, is much harder than poetry, especially after one has spent years thinking in poetry!

...or winging a quick forum post? (I am going to make an effort to actually not rewrite this one more than twice).

"layers of work"

Great way to say it.

Especially if you're going the erotic route (imho). I think erotica and humor share the common ground in that they are extremely difficult to do well. This hit me the other day (as usual it's something so obvious I never saw it): sex is up there at the top of the most pleasurable human activities (laughing is not far behind). But to write a story or poetry - talking equal shares of difficulty (for me anyway), so on one end you have high pleasure and the other high difficulty. Talk about conflict. But to make it appear effortless.... like when you see a comedian who looks like he's pulling those thoughts out of thin air and making it appear so casual and easy - no. Hours and hours and hours of work went into getting that act down so it looks like pulling thoughts out of the air.

 

[hmmnmm]

and on a possibly totally unrelated note and because I suffer extreme self-inflicted hangover symptoms.... but it does pertain to writing. Eventually.

I've come to understand two new truths since being in this land of which I am not native. For one thing I've seen I have to figure out a quick, edited answer to questions about why I actually love being here, because most here would give anything to go to the place I came from. So the sis in-law and her husband (is the husband of a sister in law a brother in law? or in-law of an in-law?) came over last night and after polishing off three large containers of beer and moving to the wine, it became a featured discussion topic.

The other thing that's been more like a gradual awareness - could call it a Stealth Truth - is that there is no such thing as a secret. And this makes the alcohol consumption doubly perilous, and there is much consumption of alcohol. Makes it more difficult to keep from spilling a few thoughts or attractions that one would otherwise keep to themselves - I've become more aware that more people know more about me than I might care to know or think about.

So the hour got late, wife went to bed, and it was just me and the bro and the sis and the discussion veered into how I spend my time and that I like to write but I have a hard time finishing stuff and that's the big thing I have to beat is the habit of starting lots of stuff but not finishing.

And then she says my wife had told her that "you like to write erotica" at which point I silently understood 'okay so it's out - should've known that, it was never a secret' at which point I could not deny it, but reiterated what I mentioned above, about it being a really difficult task - writing alone is difficult, and writing about something that is an enormous human pleasure adds to that difficulty. What I didn't get into but realized afterwards, was that erotica is like the one area that one tends to not go around and admit to - like if someone asks 'oh so you like write? what do you like to write?' and you could answer just about anything without feeling like you have to explain yourself, but you might not feel comfortable saying, 'yeah I like to write stuff with lots erotic tension and lots of sex fluids running all over the place'.

It was only after I woke up just a few hours ago that I realized how casually we discussed the art of erotica - with family. Talked about erotica in literature and film... what makes it work and why it is so difficult to do well.... Was on the same level as if she'd said "so I hear you like write about fishing - or golf"

I'm still chewing on the broader ramifications of this - because if sis knows then other people know - before long everybody will know or already does - which on the one hand relieves a lot of the pressure to feel like I have to be sly about what I really enjoy - on the other, it's a swift kick in the ass to actually finish something and get it out there. And it better be fucking good.

I came real close to spilling the beans about my activity on Literotica. But then I realized they probably already know that too.

 

[Angeline]

The Dodge Poetry Festival is underway in New Jersey. Anyone going this year? Dora?