writers-on-writing

Writin_ Is Fightin'!

There is a curious idea among unscientific men that in scientific writing there is a common plateau of perfectionism. Nothing could be more untrue. The reports of biologists are the measure, not of the science, but of the men themselves. There are as few scientific giants as any other kind. In some reports it is impossible, because of inept expression, to relate the descriptions to the living animals. In some papers collecting places are so mixed or ignored that the animals mentioned cannot be found at all. The same conditioning forces itself into specification as it does into any other kind of observation, and the same faults of carelessness will be found in scientific reports as in the witness chair of a criminal court. It has seemed sometimes that the little men in scientific work assumed the awe-fullness of a priesthood to hide their deficiencies, as the witch-doctor does with his stilts and high masks, as the priesthoods of all cults have, with secret or unfamiliar languages and symbols. It is usually found that only the little stuffy men object to what is called "popularization", by which they mean writing with a clarity understandable to one not familiar with the tricks and codes of the cult. We have not known a single great scientist who could not discourse freely and interestingly with a child. Can it be that the haters of clarity have nothing to say, have observed nothing, have no clear picture of even their own fields? A dull man seems to be a dull man no matter what his field, and of course it is the right of a dull scientist to protect himself with feathers and robes, emblems and degrees, as do other dull men who are potentates and grand imperial rulers of lodges of dull men.

He would write and write. He would make wonderful things happen. Some of it would be true. All of it would be true. Most of it would be true.

There is only one way to overcome the difficulty of writing, and that is to write. Thought only becomes effective and productive at the time of writing.

I practiced law for five years and that gives you insight into a certain mind-set that maybe a lot of writers haven__ had firsthand access to. There__ an almost casual cruelty, a very low level of overall awareness, but sometimes there__ also knowledge that real damage is being done__his attitude of __h, what the hell,_ this kind of moral cognitive dissonance. These are people who have never missed a meal. It__ an unknowingness, an unawareness . . . Many people were operating from a very narrow range of experience, and yet they had complete faith in it. Their way was the correct way, the only way. They had virtually no awareness of any other way of life except in terms of demonizing things . . . It__ an extremely blindered experience of the world.

Getting the first draft finished is like pushing a very dirty peanut across the floor with your nose.

You say grace before meals. I say grace before I dip the pen in the ink.

There are times you wake up in the middle of the night, fingers hit the keyboard and you allow words to flow. That is a writer.

I'm trying to give my character voice but he won't speak.

I'm in love with writing, but sometimes I swear it hates me.

The writer sat besides the weeping Gilgamesh, witnessed the sinking of the unsinkable ships. He was there, and he wasn't. Like a naturalist observing the tarn of life from an unseen bubble of neutrality.

Definition of a Writer: One who tells stories that demand to be told.

You have to be in your middle thirties before you have anything worth saying.

Remove the comma, replace the comma, remove the comma, replace the comma...

Publish a book before you__e too old to read it without glasses.

Every writer has only one story to tell, and he has to find a way of telling it until the meaning becomes clearer and clearer, until the story becomes at once more narrow and larger, more and more precise, more and more reverberating.

The writer sat besides the weeping Gilgamesh, swam out of all the unsinkable ships sank. He was there, and he wasn't. Like a naturalist observing the tarn of life from an unseen bubble of neutrality.

I don__ know_,_ he said. __hose three words from a willing soul are the start of a grand and magnificent voyage._ And with that he began a discourse that lasted for several weeks, covering scene-setting, establishing conflict, plot twists, and first- and third-person narration. [ I learned in these rapid-fire mini-dissertations that like most literature lovers I would come to know, Henry was a book snob. He assumed that if a current author was popular and widely enjoyed, then he or she had no merit. He made a few exceptions, such as Kurt Vonnegut, although that was mostly because Vonnegut lived on Cape Cod and so he probably had some merits as a human being, if not as a writer. I think that the way Henry saw it was that he was not being a snob. In fact I would venture that in his view of things, snobbery had nothing to do with it. Rather, it was a matter of standards. It was bout quality in the author__ craftsmanship.