December 6, 2011
Cécile Alduy: “If we come back to The Table Comes First, cooking, of course, is a great metaphor for writing. The metaphor runs discreetly through the book. You draw this funny analogy between shell beans and writing: ‘Like sentences, shell beans are a great deal more trouble to produce than anyone who is not producing them knows … And then even the best shell beans, cleaned and simmered, are like sentences in that nobody actually appreciates them as much as they deserve to be appreciated.’ So I wanted to know what is the unit, or ingredient, you work on …
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Source: “Montaigne, the Double Man, and Shelled Beans”
Labels: Writing
November 9, 2011
But for me, successful writing has usually been a case of having found good conditions for real, effortless concentration.
Ted Hughes
Poet
Via: @parisreview
Labels: Writing
September 13, 2011
The loss of people writing—writing a composition, a letter or a report—is not just the loss for the record. It’s the loss of the process of working your thoughts out on paper, of having an idea that you would never have had if you weren’t [writing]. And that’s a handicap. People [I research] were writing letters every day. That was calisthenics for the brain.
David McCullough
Historian
Source: 10 Questions by TIME
Labels: Writing
May 20, 2011
First, I always write a script. It’s easier to write than to draw. I can write lying in bed, or on the subway—but I can’t draw in that condition. Once the thing is written, I begin drawing it directly in ink, and painting out things that don’t work. As you start to stage the spatial drama of a picture story—which is like a piece of theatre—you realize either which parts of the text are useless or which parts of the text are necessary. You can’t really know until you see it happening spatially, in front of you.
Ben Katchor
Cartoonist
Source: Project: First Drafts
Via: Scott Berkun
Labels: Writing
March 6, 2011
What I mean is that the line by which I travel from one place to the next is always sinuous because it must accompany the development of the narrative, which might require something here or there that was not needed previously. The narrative must be attentive to the needs of a particular moment, which is to say that nothing is predetermined. If a story were predetermined—even if that were possible, down to the last detail that is to be written—then the work would be a total failure. The book would be obliged to exist before it existed. A book comes …
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Source: The Art of Fiction No. 155
Labels: Writing
December 17, 2010
I want to bring pleasure with everything I write. Intellectual pleasure, emotional pleasure, linguistic pleasure, aesthetic pleasure.
Jonathan Franzen
Novelist
Source: Jonathan Franzen Speaks! by The Daily Beast
Via: @parisreview
Labels: Writing
August 13, 2010
“It seems all the more imperative, nowadays, to fashion books that are compelling, because there is so much more distraction they have to resist. To me, now, to do something new is not to develop a form for the novel that has never been seen on earth before. It means to try to come to terms as a person and a citizen with what’s happening in the world now and do it in some comprehensible, coherent way.
We are so distracted by and engulfed by the technologies we’ve created, and by the constant barrage of so-called information that comes our …
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Source: “Jonathan Franzen: The Wide Shot” by Lev Grossman, TIME
Labels: Freedom | Writing
July 27, 2010
“I’ve never defined myself as a writer, or, God forbid, an author. I’m a person—someone who goes to work every morning, like the plumber or the television repairman, and who goes home at the end of the day to think about other things. I can’t imagine not going to work as long as I can. …
I try to refocus my frazzled writers on the process of writing, not the product. If the process is sound, the product will take care of itself. Recently I got a letter from a young woman writer who was back home in California after her annual visit. She said, ‘Your office is a sanctuary of craft amidst the hullabaloo of publishers, editors, and agents. You have no idea how liberating that is.’
It may seem perverse that I compare my writing to plumbing, an occupation not regarded as high-end. But to me all work is equally honorable, all crafts an astonishment when they are performed with skill and self-respect. Just as I go to work every day with my tools, which are words, the plumber arrives with his kit of wrenches and washers, and afterward the pipes have been so adroitly fitted together that they don’t leak. I don’t want any of my sentences to leak. The fact that someone can make water come out of a faucet on the 10th floor strikes me as a feat no less remarkable than the construction of a clear declarative sentence.”
Source: Life and Work by William Zinsser, Writer, Editor, Teacher
Via: The Casual Optimist
Labels: Work | Writing
