This is why I don’t really buy this argument [that the internet is causing a decline in literacy]. I think this argument comes from people saying, “Oh, texting is so idiotic, and tweeting is so idiotic.” Well, go look at telegrams. They were kind of idiotic, too. And some of them were really good, because the person sending the telegram was taking time and care to be kind of witty. Some people take time and care in their tweets and their texts to be kind of witty. But it’s like a telegram: we can’t confuse those with literature.
Category Archives: Quotes
see it for what it really is
I want you to consider one other possibility before going the self-publishing route. I want you to consider putting your book away—as in don’t read it, edit it, or think about it—for six months. … Setting your novel aside for six months separates you from your notions of it. It empties your head of all you think your book is and allows you, six months later, to see it for what it really is. There may not be a more useful book revising tool.
that time of helpless feeling
Novelists appear to dwell most deeply in their childhoods. Even when they talk about their reading, they’re apt to say the books that matter most to them are ones that they discovered then, during that time of helpless feeling, when emotions are absolute.
try to change it
If I’m consistently unhappy about an aspect of my life, I try to change it instead of just complaining.
This.
silences
In my undergraduate creative nonfiction workshops, I begin each semester with a writing prompt that asks students to interrogate their own silences as essayists. Make a list, I say, of all the things you would never write about. What’s too painful? What’s too new? What’s too private? After they’ve been jotting notes for a few minutes, I ask them to look back over the list and add because clauses to each item – why they would never write about each subject. This way, they can share their reasons with the class, without having to share the material.
The reasons for wanting not to write about something are always revealing, and after a few classes, I’ve come to think of them as falling into one of two categories: for someone else’s sake, or for our own. We may choose not to write an essay because it would hurt, or incriminate, someone else. We may choose not to write an essay because the story, compelling as it may be, doesn’t really belong to us.
But often, the only people we’re looking to protect are ourselves.
being yourself / what comes naturally
“You really want to find a way to get paid for being yourself,” [Oprah] told the audience earlier, with reference to finding your purpose in life.
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During the course of my life, I’ve worked very hard, and often with success, at things that didn’t come naturally. But in the end, I do best—and certainly most enjoy—what comes naturally. By the way, the fact that something “comes naturally” doesn’t mean that it’s easy or doesn’t require tremendous amounts of practice.
unwilling to write a mediocre page
I think George Saunders hasn’t written a novel because he’s too much of a prose perfectionist. Because he’s unwilling to write a mediocre page. Because he likes the control the short-story form gives him.
“A novel is a work of a certain length that is somehow flawed,” a wise critic once said — and as I was told during the first few weeks of my MFA program.
To write a novel, and see to it through from the first word to the 150,000th, you have to be willing to embrace the idea that every once in a while your prose is going to be, for lack of a better word, more prosaic than it would be otherwise. Why? Because to get a reader to make it through 150,000 words (the length of my last, and about the length of your average robust novel), you need this clunky, unattractive but very utilitarian thing called a plot.
Fun with quotes
Make your own here.
disproportionate guilt
If we do not respect ourselves … we are peculiarly in thrall to everyone we see, curiously determined to live out — since our self-image is untenable — their false notions of us. We flatter ourselves by thinking this compulsion to please others an attractive trait: a gist for imaginative empathy, evidence of our willingness to give. Of course I will play Francesca to your Paolo, Hellen Keller to anyone’s Annie Sullivan: no expectation is too misplaced, no role too ludicrous…
It is the phenomenon sometimes called “alienation from self.” In its advanced stages, we no longer answer the telephone, because someone might want something; that we could say no without drowning in self-reproach is an idea alien to this game. Every encounter demands too much, tears the nerves, drains the will, and the specter of something so small as an unanswered letter arouses such disproportionate guilt that answering it becomes out of the question. To assign unanswered letters their proper weight, to free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves — their lies the great, the singular power of self-respect. Without it, one eventually discovers the final turn of the screw: one runs away to find oneself, and finds no one at home.
100 novels in fragments
I spent nine years in Oxford (B.A., D.Phil., JRF), then decided I could not face the enforced specialization of academia. Spent seven years working on various novels, trying to combine this with various jobs. In 1995 I decided this must stop. I had 100 novels in fragments, including a 300-page single-spaced MS with terrible structural problems. I quit my job: I would write till money ran out. Had terrible argument with my father, could not deal with this big difficult book. Thought: We don’t pick our parents. If we could choose, I would have picked someone better than this. Thought: OK. I can’t work on this book. I will write a novel with a simple structure that can be FINISHED. I will set aside a month and write with NO INTERRUPTIONS. (Story: Son of single mother, obsessed with Seven Samurai, goes in search of better father than the one fate provided.)
Ok, now I don’t feel so bad for having eight.
The Remainder Table 