It seems to me if you can’t remember your childhood, your life will feel artificial. Your first encounters with the reality of being in a human body, and all that that means, and the state of shock that comes from trying to exist in this world — those are moments that rarely repeat themselves later. And maybe that’s why those early memories are so fragile. Because children are also fragile.
Life has taught me that wherever there is a sense of “nothing happening,” or a blank space, a memory hole, usually something is being hidden. There is a kind of silence that is really closer to gagging on something unspeakable.
Category Archives: Quotes
Eyes Open
Not long after submitting the manuscript for Super Natural Cooking, I started setting aside photos I loved, and continued to keep notebooks of my favorite recipes, ideas, and inspirations. I wasn’t sure what I would do with them, or what would emerge over time, but I had a hunch something might. Or not. Either way, I don’t like the idea of rushing these sorts of things. I’ve come to believe you can’t really rush inspiration, it comes on its own schedule, emerging and intersecting my life when it sees fit. I just try to keep my eyes open.
Keep Writing Anyway
[I]n my view a writer is a writer not because she writes well and easily, because she has amazing talent, because everything she does is golden. In my view a writer is a writer because even when there is no hope, even when nothing you do shows any sign of promise, you keep writing anyway.
Great art is not a mirror, it’s a door
In a recent interview about Jane Austen, Fran Lebowitz said that great art is “not a mirror, it’s a door.” Mediocre art is a mirror, and either you get it or you don’t, either you relate to it or you don’t.
Something that has shifted, profoundly
[C]onfessional memoirs have been irresistible to both writers and readers for a very long time, and, pretty much from the beginning, people have been complaining about the shallowness, the opportunism, the lying, the betrayals, the narcissism. This raises the question of just why the current spate of autobiography feels somehow different, somehow “worse” than ever before—more narcissistic and more disturbing in its implications. And it may well be that the answer lies not with the genre—which has, in fact, remained fairly consistent in its aims and its structure for the past millennium and a half or so—but with something that has shifted, profoundly, in the way we think about our selves and our relation to the world around us.
A wave of ill-informed goodwill
In “Formal Theories of Mass Behaviour”, William McPhee noted that a disproportionate share of the audience for a hit was made up of people who consumed few products of that type. (Many other studies have since reached the same conclusion.) A lot of the people who read a bestselling novel, for example, do not read much other fiction. By contrast, the audience for an obscure novel is largely composed of people who read a lot. That means the least popular books are judged by people who have the highest standards, while the most popular are judged by people who literally do not know any better. An American who read just one book this year was disproportionately likely to have read “The Lost Symbol”, by Dan Brown. He almost certainly liked it.
This explains why bestselling books, or blockbuster films, occasionally seem to grow not just more quickly than products which are merely very popular, but also in a wholly different way. As a media product moves from the pool of frequent consumers into the ocean of occasional consumers, the prevailing attitude to it—what Hollywood folk call word of mouth—can become less critical. The hit is carried along by a wave of ill-informed goodwill.
[It also explains why the fact people who haven’t read a book since high school are enthusiastic about your manuscript isn’t persuasive to editors.]
No one really cares about your beaten-down, introspective, whiney, sensitive … little guy with a problem
The start of a story requires three elements which begin with the letter “P.” Give me a Person in a Place with an intriguing Problem, as soon as you can, and I’m in. Until these three elements are clearly in place, your story will stumble around going nowhere. Though even then, you don’t really have a story. Only when you add the fourth “P”—a Plan—does your story begin to take shape.
Why? Because no one really cares about your beaten-down, introspective, whiney, sensitive—albeit fully drawn, provocative, nuanced, and eccentric—little guy with a problem until we find out what the guy plans to do about it.
Still, even at this point—often three or four chapters into the book—you have no story. Not yet. What we, as readers, need now is to see the character put the Plan into action, i.e., to launch the Quest. Then, and only then, do you have the primordial stew of a story.
Sleep, eat, procrastinate, and write
A friend who just finished writing a(n excellent) book in a short period of time says you have to ignore your brain when it tells you it’s done for the day. You may think you can’t keep going, but if you push on, what comes out will be even better. The next day, do the same. Repeat, repeat, repeat. Also, no socializing. Apart from whatever job pays the bills, do nothing but sleep, eat, procrastinate, and write.
The Best Part
I love that part; that’s the best part, revision. I do it even after the books are bound! Thinking about it before you write it is delicious. Writing it all out for the first time is painful because so much of the writing isn’t very good. I didn’t know in the beginning that I could go back and make it better; so I minded very much writing badly. But now I don’t mind at all because there’s that wonderful time in the future when I will make it better, when I can see better what I should have said and how to change it. I love that part!
The signal to spend it now
One of the few things I know about writing is this: spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book, or for another book; give it, give it all, give it now. The impulse to save something good for a better place later is the signal to spend it now. Something more will arise for later, something better. These things fill from behind, from beneath, like well water. Similarly, the impulse to keep to yourself what you have learned is not only shameful, it is destructive. Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you. You open your safe and find ashes.
The Remainder Table 