Posts tagged "writing"
Fiction is the lie through which we tell the truth.
Albert Camus (via ink-imp)
When I start to write a story, I don’t know the conclusion at all and I don’t know what’s going to happen next. If there is a murder case as the first thing, I don’t know who the killer is. I write the book because I would like to find out. If I know who the killer is, there’s no purpose to writing the story.
The short story, if you really are intense and you have an exciting idea, writes itself in a few hours. I try to encourage my student friends and my writer friends to write a short story in one day so it has a skin around it, its own intensity, its own life, its own reason for being. There’s a reason why the idea occurred to you at that hour anyway, so go with that and investigate it, get it down. Two or three thousand words in a few hours is not that hard. Don’t let people interfere with you. Boot ’em out, turn off the phone, hide away, get it done. If you carry a short story over to the next day you may overnight intellectualize something about it and try to make it too fancy, try to please someone.
Went to Robert Hass’ reading at butler the other day. Enjoyed his reading of his poetry much more than how I read his poems in my head. I’m still new with enjoying poetry, but he made me think: “So poetry can be read like this!” One thing he said about writing that I thought was important for aspiring writers: “I was terrified of writing programs, so I read instead.” It’s easy to think that simply going to workshops or reading about writing will help us get somewhere, but the reality is that we just need to READ.
1. Read
You must try to know everything that has ever been written that is worth remembering, and you must keep up with what your contemporaries are doing. Fitzgerald’s advice to his daughter, Scottie, is as good as any there is on this subject: you must try to absorb six good authors a year. This means that you do not read books as an English major is trained to read them; you swallow them. You ingest them, and move on. You do not stop to analyze or think much; you just take them into yourself, and go on to the next one. And you read obsessively, too: if you really like something, you read it over and over through the years. You come to know the world’s literature by heart. Every good writer I know or have known began with an insatiable appetite for books, for plundering what is in them, for the nourishment provided by them, which you can’t get from any other source.
You must try to know everything that has ever been written that is worth remembering, and you must keep up with what your contemporaries are doing. Fitzgerald’s advice to his daughter, Scottie, is as good as any there is on this subject: you must try to absorb six good authors a year. This means that you do not read books as an English major is trained to read them; you swallow them. You ingest them, and move on. You do not stop to analyze or think much; you just take them into yourself, and go on to the next one. And you read obsessively, too: if you really like something, you read it over and over through the years. You come to know the world’s literature by heart. Every good writer I know or have known began with an insatiable appetite for books, for plundering what is in them, for the nourishment provided by them, which you can’t get from any other source.
Richard Bausch, Letter to a Young Writer
