This time it was the sentence opening the last part of a story I had worked on for months: a sentence as is often worked off paper first. The pace of narrative and interest in character do not readily help the writer's hand to set down a sentence of that order. For though characters must take things in their own stride – somewhere in his story the writer cannot hold back this sentence that judges them. He wants it unobtrusive to his pace and the characters that caused him to write. The difficulty is to judge without seeming to be there, with a finality in the words that will make them casual and part of the story itself, except perhaps to another age.
Louis ZukofskyThis story was a story of our time. And a writer's attempts not to fathom his time amount but to sounding his mind in it.
Louis ZukofskyThe more the words of others impressed him with their factual content, the more he felt he must wait for his own facts before being tempted into words.
Louis ZukofskyIn our modern world, this elemental quality of storytelling is denied. We live today in a world in which everything has its place and function and nothing is left out of place. Storytelling is thus at a discount and like everything else in a world ruled by the laws of exchange value, literature is required to submit itself to the requirements of the market and must learn, like any other commodity, to adapt and serve needs that lie outside of itself and its concrete value. It is forced to stand not for itself but for an ideological cause of one sort or another, whether it be political, social or literary. It cannot exist for itself: like everything else it has to be justified. And for this very reason the power of storytelling is automatically devalued. Literature is reduced to the status of complimentary utilitarian functions: as a pastime to provide distraction and entertainment, or as a heightened activity that would claim to explore 'great truths' about the human condition.
Michael RichardsonTags: art writing writers stories literature entertainment surrealism commodity
Though the immediate impression of rebellion may obscure the fact, the task of authentic literature is nevertheless only conceivable in terms of a desire for fundamental communication with the reader.
Georges BatailleTags: writing writers communication literature reader rebellion
Rich will be my life if I
can keep my memories full
and brimming, and record
them on clear-eyed
mornings while I set
joyously to work setting
pen to holy craft.
Tags: life success writing writers work memories craft roman novelist payne novel-writing rooftop-soliloquy succeeding
Who is better off? The one who writes to revel in the voluptuousness of the life that surrounds them? Or the one who writes to escape the tediousness of that which awaits them outside? Whose flame will last longer?
Roman PayneTags: books writing writers interview heroism writer escape publishing flame roman novelist heroic roman-payne novel-writing author-interview tediousness voluptuousness
1. Write like you’ll live forever — fear is a bad editor.
2. Write like you’ll croak today — death is the best editor.
3. Fooling others is fun. Fooling yourself is a lethal mistake.
4. Pick one — fame or delight.
5. The archer knows the target. The poet knows the wastebasket.
6. Cunning and excess are your friends.
7. TV and liquor are your enemies.
8. Everything eternal happens in a spare room at 3 a.m.
9. You’re done when the crows sing.
Tags: writers on-writing rules author writing-process dakron ron-dakron writing-rules
...at some point you need to stop looking out at others and start looking inward, at yourself, at your own accomplishments, at your own foibles, at your own successes and your own failures. It's only when you begin to look inward that you can begin to have an effect on those out there, the ones with the greedy eyes and outstretched hands.
Scott F. FalknerTags: success writing writers failure
In my profession it isn’t a question of telling good literature from bad. Really good literature is seldom appreciated in its own day. The best authors die poor, the bad ones make money — it’s always been like that. What do I, an agent, get out of a literary genius who won’t be discovered for another hundred years? I’ll be dead myself then. Successful incompetents are what I need.
Walter MoersTags: writing writers literature
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