Quotes & Notes: Got to Serve the Book
by Steven Wingate
”The more books we read, the clearer it becomes that the true function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece and that no other task is of any consequence.” —Cyril Connolly
”The more books we read, the clearer it becomes that the true function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece and that no other task is of any consequence.” —Cyril Connolly
“Young writers should be encouraged to write, and discouraged from thinking they are writers. If they arrive at college with literary ambitions, they should be told that everything they have done since their first childhood poems, printed in the school paper, has been preparation for entering a long, long apprenticeship.” —Wallace Stegner, On Teaching and Writing Fiction
“Stopped hanging other people’s art.”
— a journal entry by Ad Reinhardt (1913-1967)
“One is not born a genius, one becomes a genius.”
— Simone de Beauvoir
“Were I called on to define, very briefly, the term Art, I should call it ‘the reproduction of what the Senses perceive in Nature through the veil of the soul’.” –Edgar Allan Poe
Inspired by Elmore Leonard’s 10 Rules of Writing, the Guardian recently asked several contemporary authors for their own rules of writing. Writers such as Margaret Atwood, Annie Proulx, Jonathan Franzen, Philip Pullman, Zadie Smith, and many others answered the call ((Here’s Part One; and here’s Part Two). You may have noticed that at Fiction Writers Review, we take our rules with a pinch of skepticism. (Steven Wingate’s Quotes & Notes series has investigated some of the “rules” embodied in writing-related quotes.) But writing is a hard job, and we all long for the magic formula that will help us get […]
“Everywhere I go, I’m asked if the universities stifle writers. My opinion is that they don’t stifle enough of them.” — Flannery O’Connor
It’s hard to argue with your heroes, though it’s significantly easier after they’ve died. Flannery O’Connor—the first writer I wanted to be—refers in this quote to creative writing workshops, which were just becoming the new standard for writerly apprenticeship when she launched her career. But I don’t have the same issues as she had with the workshop paradigm as it’s now practiced, or with the proliferation of creative writing programs.
“Always give your characters their best shot.” — Stuart M. Kaminsky
As writers, we can add on (and on) to the external details of a character, trying to make that person real in the way that Pinocchio hopes to become so. Theoretically, we might be able to acquire enough details in a personality inventory for our readers to accept our characters as convincing. But ultimately, as Stuart Kaminsky knew, this way of creating character doesn’t work because it’s the subtext of our characters’ lives that make them real. Using the “inventory” process to get to know them is fundamentally flawed because it makes us lazy.
“Popular art is the dream of society; it does not examine itself.” –Margaret Atwood
“Every book I publish is an opportunity for me to reinvent myself as a writer.” — Steve Katz
The easy thing to do when we finish one writing project, the default thing, is to simply think about what we’re going to write next. Katz’s words, however, call us to engage in a deeper kind of reconsideration of ourselves, because what we write and who we are as writers are two crucially different things.
