Category Archives: Quotes

A blog doesn’t seem to have any literary merit at all

Paul Theroux really doesn’t like blogs:

You could say blog-like, but I think “blog-like” is a disparaging term. I loathe blogs when I look at them. Blogs look to me illiterate, they look hasty, like someone babbling. To me writing is a considered act. It’s something which is a great labor of thought and consideration. A blog doesn’t seem to have any literary merit at all. It’s a chatty account of things that have happened to that particular person.

—Paul Theroux

Oh, PT. I do love your writing, but I think you’re conflating form and content. There are plenty of books that could be described as “illiterate,” “hasty,” “babbling,” and without “any literary merit” (see, e.g.: any book “written” by a reality show personality) but somehow I doubt you loathe books or think calling something “book-like” is disparaging. Am I right?

What storytellers are supposed to do

Being anxious is very much like being watched – by another, by your partner, by the world, by yourself. Anxiety is about sprinting ahead, spinning tales and stories and the long, long train of endless possibilities. It’s what storytellers are supposed to do; useful during the act of writing, not so useful in the living of a non-panicked life. Anxious people are in search of a scroll; a scroll that can be rolled out to tell us the meaning of all that has already happened and warn us of what is to come. We are imaginative people who carve something out of nothing and yet we’re still in search of the Oracle. No wonder we’re a little bit unsteady, a little bit on edge.

—Emily Rapp

Those who stay and those who leave

During the panel “The Art of the Novel” on Sunday, novelist Susan Straight said that while writing her new book she learned there were two types of people: those who stay and those who leave. … Straight’s novel portrays characters who migrate back and forth between California and Louisiana, in efforts to escape the past and find a future.

—Chris Daley

The slow death of logical thought

In recent years I’ve tutored students at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism whose writing is disorganized almost beyond human help, but they seldom mention “writing” as what they came to the school to learn. … They return from a reporting assignment with a million notes and a million quotes and no idea what the story is about.

The reason, I assume–and I don’t expect a Nobel Prize for this deduction–is that people now get their information mainly from random images on a screen and from random messages in their ears, and it no longer occurs to them that writing is linear and sequential; sentence B must follow sentence A. Every year student writing is a little more disheveled; I’m witnessing the slow death of logical thought. So is every English teacher in America.

—William Zinsser

What must happen

[Friday Night Lights]’s sole focus is on the episodes themselves, resisting what has become standard in TV marketing – online franchising in the form of tabloid features, extensive merchandising, and audience participation via wiki fan sites.  … It’s a crucial decision, if you think of FNL (and I do) as well-crafted art.  The serial narrative – in both TV and literature – when offered up to fans as participants, can become vulnerable.  …  The creators of FNL are not interested in what fans want or need to happen to the characters, but rather about what must happen to them, in the world they’ve created.

—Sonya Chung

Not writing

Not writing is important: it’s restorative. Taking a break from the work is also a part the work. Nobody really talks about that part of being a writer, and I know why they don’t. It’s scary. When I’m writing, I feel plugged in and energized and in sync. But when I’m not writing, I feel out of it. I have the very real fear that I’ll never be able to write anything ever again.  When you look at the stiff, dark branches of trees in the winter, isn’t it hard to imagine those same trees all lush and full of leaves?

But winter happens. Then spring comes.

—Sarah Selecky
in guest post at Pickle Me This

My reading time would just feel like work time

I don’t have an electronic reader, or whatever those are called. I’m still old school and I like holding the pages. Also, I look at a computer screen and a blackberry all f-cking day. I need some separation from that, and I feel like if I were to read off one of those future readers, my reading time would just feel like work time. So I’m a relic.

—Lainey Lui