KATHERINE ANNE PORTER ON WRITING STORIES January 1, 2008
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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.”
FICTION AND WRITER’S BLOCK January 12, 2007
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On January 12, 2007, E. L. Doctorow was invited to speak to an AP English class at Cardozo High School in Washington, D.C. When they asked him how he wrote his novel Ragtime, he said that he hadn’t begun with an outline or even an idea of what the story was. He started with just a description of a house, a neighborhood and a moment in time, “Fiction gets written almost as if you’re writing to find out what you’re writing,” he said.
When they asked him about writer’s block, he said, “You can get it when you’re writing the wrong thing. The right thing flows.”
