KATHERINE ANNE PORTER ON WRITING STORIES January 1, 2008
Posted by thenaturalist in Fiction, Writing.add a comment
In The Collected Essays and Occasional Writings of Katherine Anne Porter, published in 1970, she says, “Now and again thousands of memories converge, harmonize, arrange themselves around a central idea in a coherent form, and I write a story.” She also says, “I keep notes and journals only because I write a great deal, and the habit of writing helps me arrange, annotate, stow away conveniently the referrences I may need later. Yet when I begin a story, I can never work in any of those promising paragraphs, those apt phrases, those small turns of anecdote I had believed would be so valuable. I must know a story ‘by heart’ and I must write from memory.”
