In his essay “Mr. Difficult,” [Jonathan] Franzen presents two models of how fiction and readers relate: the Status and Contract models. The Status model says that “the best novels are great works of art, the people who manage to write them deserve extraordinary credit, and if the average reader rejects the work it’s because the average reader is a philistine.” The Contract model says, “difficulty is a sign of trouble. In the most grievous cases, it may convict an author of violating the contract with his own community; of placing his self-expressive imperatives or his personal vanity or his literary-club membership ahead of the audience’s legitimate desire for connection—of being, in other words, an asshole.”
Category Archives: Quotes
Who will there be to talk to
There is one line in [my father’s] memoir I find particularly poignant. It is a clunky line that I wanted to fix but resisted. My father and his brother Ken had recently been talking, recollecting stories for the memoir. My father writes, “Just the other day Ken said, ‘When one of us is gone who will there be to talk to, that not having been there will understand?’” To which my father simply replies, “How true.” It is, in some fashion, the question every writer asks. How true.
Getting the message
Reading isn’t merely being able to pronounce the words correctly, a fact that surprises most people. Reading is being able to make sense from the marks on the page. Reading is being able to make the print mean something. Reading is getting the message.
—Mem Fox
(via)
The Internet has changed us
The point, it seems to me, isn’t whether the Internet is “good” or “bad” for our brains. The Internet has changed us, just as the printed book and the typewriter did. The Internet sharpens us and makes us faster thinkers, more adept at shifting between tasks, even as it erodes our ability to focus on a single topic, a single work, for long periods of time. The point is that whether you think the Internet is “good for your mind”, or exactly the opposite, depends on your values.
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it seems to me that [Nicholas Carr has] approached this problem primarily as a writer—in other words, as someone whose profession requires the ability to close oneself in a room and remain utterly focused on the business of researching and completing a manuscript for hours at a time. For a writer, an inability to focus for long periods on the work at hand is at best an impediment, at worst a disaster.
Layers of honesty and dishonesty
Academic scholarship succeeds brilliantly at times because it is disinterested: you need not know why a scientist, for example, is studying fruit flies. But I’m not interested in that kind of work. In my profession, one of the great failings of literary theory has been that the writing is not only impersonal, it also seeks mightily to be free of contradictions. How many university professors do you know who don’t present themselves as unimpeachable authorities? I have made a fairly conscious decision to produce writing that is honest. And even as I say that, I realize that one of the things I try to do is reveal the layers of honesty and dishonesty in what I’m writing.
A kind of ethical or spiritual discipline
I think sometimes about writing nonfiction as a kind of ethical or spiritual discipline. The true thing, told plainly, is not always the thing that makes the liveliest story. In real life, the bon mot wasn’t always uttered, the climax didn’t happen in a setting with an objective correlative handy, and the good guy didn’t always triumph. Life resists plot–at least on the surface. To entertain–or to “teach and delight,” in the classical formulation–it’s sometimes simpler to turn to another genre. But if we decide to pursue creative nonfiction, then the truth (our own remembered, subjective truth) functions as do the rhyme and meter requirements of a sonnet. It offers us boundaries, discipline. We are faithful to it. It pressures us into discovering the material’s own form, into making a new thing that is compelling.
Kind
When I was young, I admired clever people. Now that I am old, I admire kind people.
—Abraham Joshua Hesche
(via)
A specific copy
One reads a certain edition, a specific copy, recognizable by the roughness or smoothness of its paper, by its scent, by a slight tear on page 72 and a coffee ring on the right-hand corner of the back cover.
—Alberto Manguel,
in A History of Reading
(via)
Telling the truth as best you can
Nonfiction means you are telling the truth as best you can. You don’t make it up. The creativity is in the arrrangement of words, sentences, paragraphs. The creativity is in your metaphors, your description, the detail you bring to the page. The creativity is your choices as you structure the narrative.
Tolerance for uncertainty
“I think the single most defining characteristic of a writer” – I found myself saying to a friend the other day, when she asked my thoughts on the teaching of writing – “I mean the difference between a writer and someone who ‘wants to be a writer,’ is a high tolerance for uncertainty.”
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It’s hard to write well. But it may be even harder to simply keep writing; which, by the way, is the only way to write better.
The Remainder Table 