Posts for category ‘commonplace book’

“The creative writer is compulsively concrete—that is, he is bound to the things of experience. However strongly he holds his ideas, he cannot express them in the way a philosopher or a social scientist does. He does not deal in concepts, in formulated patterns of thought, but in iconic ways, in the way of images and imitations; he is concerned with people, places, actions, feelings, sensations. His fictional house should be haunted by ideas, not inhabited by them; they should flit past the window after dark, not fill the rooms.”

“The prayer of anyone hoping to make himself into a writer should be ‘Lord let me grow into such a man as has something to say! Let me be one of those that Henry James speaks of, one of those upon whom nothing is lost. Let understanding and wisdom be engraved on my mind as deep as the lines of living on a wise and weathered face. Teach me to love and teach me to be humble and let me learn to respect human differences, human privacy, human dignity, human pain. And then let me find the words to say it so it can’t be overlooked and can’t be forgotten.’”

A couple of meaty Wallace Stegner quotes I came across in my reading this weekend…

On writing:

“…[a writer's] materials obviously must come out of life. These materials are people, places, things—especially people. If fiction isn’t people it is nothing, and so any fiction writer is obligated to be to some degree a lover of his fellowmen, though he may…love some of them a damn sight better than others. The people of his stories and novels will be, inevitably but in altered shapes, the people he himself has known. The flimsy little protestations that mark the front gate of every novel, the solemn statements that any resemblance to real persons living or dead is entirely coincidental, are fraudulent every time. A writer has no other material to make his people from than the people of his experience. If there is no resemblance to any real person, living or dead, the character is going to be pretty unconvincing.”

On reading:

“In all our wandering though real or fictional worlds it is probably ourselves we seek, and since that encounter is impossible we want the next-best thing: the completely intimate contact which may show us another like ourselves. … a book which has profoundly and intensely moved us is a most intimate experience, perhaps more intimate than marriage and more revealing than fifty years of friendship. We can make closer contact in fiction than in reality; more surely than we know the secrets of our friends, we know how this writer who is something like ourselves looks upon himself, how he fronts his life, how he, another waif in a bewildering world, has made out to survive and perhaps be at peace.”

These are both from Penguin’s Wallace Stegner: On Teaching and Writing Fiction. It’s a thin little paperback that caught my eye when I was at the library picking up a book on vermiculture (thank you, Twitter!). I’ve liked what Stegner I’ve read, but didn’t know he’d written about writing in any official way. I love his articulation here of both of these ideas. And, the latter part of the first quote made me laugh—when I speak at schools and tell kids where my ideas come from, I tell them that the disclaimer on the legalese page of books is generally b.s.

(Both gleaned from Volume II of collected Paris Review interviews - these collections belong in every writer’s library.)

“…I had, after reading Flaubert’s letters and the life stories of those writers I most admired, embraced the ethic of literary modernism that no serious writer can escape: to dedicate myself to art without expecting anything in return, to shun fame, success, and cheaply won popularity, to love literature for its own beauty.” – Orhan Pamuk

When asked if she makes changes in galleys, Eudora Welty replied:

“I correct or change words, but I can’t rewrite a scene or make a major change because there’s a sense then of someone looking over my shoulder. It’s necessary, anyway, to trust that moment when you were sure at last you had done all you could, done your best for that time. When it’s finally in print, you’re delivered—you don’t ever have to look at it again. It’s too late to worry about its failings. I’ll have to apply any lessons this book has taught me toward writing the next one.”