WRITING vs. ORAL TRADITION January 30, 2009
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Jan Frel, a cultural critic and editor at the progressive news site AlterNet, holds that writing in general, rather than a reliance on oral tradition, has had a deleterious effect on culture.
SALMAN RUSHDIE ON HIS WRITING SELF December 26, 2008
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In an article about Salman Rushdie in a New York Times Sunday Arts and Leisure section about the time his novel The Enchantress of Florence came out, he was quoted as saying, “There’s a writing self which is not quite your ordinary social self and which you don’t really have access to except at the moment when you’re writing, and certainly in my view, I think of that as my best self …. To be able to be that person feels good; it feels better than anything else.”
EZRA POUND ON WRITERS November 3, 2008
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Ezra Pound defines “good writers” in an interesting way: “Good writers are those who keep the language efficient. That is to say, keep it accurate, keep it clear.” This has been my mission in life, so am I a good writer or just an efficient, accurate, and clear writer? Remains to be seen . . . .
THOREAU ON WRITING IN THE DARK March 21, 2008
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Henry David Thoreau had some interesting habits. He once explained, “I put a piece of paper under my pillow, and when I could not sleep I wrote in the dark.”
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.”
BEING A WRITER January 16, 2007
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Alan Bennett — British author, playwright, and actor — says, “A writer is only a writer when writing. The rest is marking time.” So does that mean all it takes is writing? No publishing? No finishing anything? Just writing and writing and writing? That seems easy enough ….
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.”
THE WRITER’S TASK July 15, 2006
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Scott Russell Sanders said in an interview that “One task of the writer is to reclaim and rehabilitate the language.” I think I need to read his new (2006) book, A Private History of Awe. I’d like to see what he has done with the word awe. Knowing Scott, he has probably made it worth thinking about in new ways and maybe even risk experiencing ….
WRITING July 4, 2006
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Susan Sontag said, “If I thought what I’m doing when I write is expressing myself, I’d junk the typewriter. Writing is a much more complicated activity than that.”
THE WRITING LIFE June 22, 2006
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Garret Keizer has just gotten a Guggenheim Fellowship for Nonfiction. According to the Chronicle of Barton, “On a good day, he gets up early and starts to write in earnest after his wife has left for work. It’s tough though to avoid being distracted by other responsibilities when the workday is dictated largely by yourself, and when the work is such that it might, or might not, actually make some money. So he asks himself, if I worked at Tap and Die would I be doing this at two in the afternoon? No, he’d be working, and the laundry and the lawn would simply have to wait. The same idea of work has to apply to writing. On the other hand, he said, he sometimes gets his best ideas while stacking wood or mowing the lawn. ‘To do this, or any other kind of self-employment, you’re making a trade-off.’ A self-employed man once told him, ‘I work 60 hours a week for myself so I don’t have to work 40 hours a week for someone else.’ It’s a philosophy Mr. Keizer relates to…. ‘Other people dream of getting rich so they won’t have to work anymore,’ he said. ‘Artists and writers want to get rich so they can keep working. Doing what I want to do has been gratifying.’”
