The Writer's Craft
The Sanity Inspector
analogous to a good country breakfast: what we want is something
simple, but nourishing to the imagination. Hold the philosophy, hold
the adjectives, just give us a plain subject and verb and perhaps a
wholesome, nonfattening adverb or two.
-- Larry McMurtry
God only exhibits his thunder and lightning at intervals, and
so they always command attention. These are God's adjectives. You
thunder and lightning too much; the reader ceases to get under the
bed, by and by.
-- Mark Twain
Cut out all those exclamation marks. An exclamation mark is
like laughing at your own jokes.
--F. Scott Fitzgerald
My method is to take the utmost trouble to find the right
thing to say, and then to say it with the utmost levity.
-- George Bernard Shaw
Technique alone is never enough. You have to have passion.
Technique alone is just an embroidered potholder.
-- Raymond Chandler
--
bruce
The dignified don't even enter in the game.
--The Jam
The Sanity Inspector
-- E. B. White
If you can tell stories, create characters, devise incidents,
and have sincerity and passion, it doesn’t matter a damn how you
write.
-- W. Somerset Maugham
Logic! Good gracious! What rubbish! How can I tell what I
think till I see what I say?
-- E.M. Forster
Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can see
only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that
way.
-- E.L. Doctorow
If your character suddenly pulls a half-eaten carrot out of
her pocket, let her. Later you can ask yourself if it rings true.
-- Anne Lamott
Books choose their authors; the act of creation is not
entirely a rational and conscious one.
-- Salman Rushdie
The Sanity Inspector
they do, because you don’t. Stay open to them. It’s teatime and the
dolls are at the table. Listen. It’s that simple.
-- Anne Lamott
Writing became such a process of discovery that I couldn't
wait to get to work in the morning: I wanted to know what I was going
to say.
-- Sharon O'Brien
Get black on white.
-- Guy de Maupassant
You can’t want to be a writer, you have to be one.
-- Paul Theroux
Start writing! Now! As Oliver Stone wrote: "Writing = ass
in chair."
-- Howard Gordon
A ratio of failures is built into the process of writing. The
wastebasket has evolved for a reason.
-- Margaret Atwood
Write as if your parents are dead... we will discuss libel
later.
-- Anne Lamott
Grace McGarvie
year, when I quite abruptly lost my faith . . . and afterwards, to prove
my new-found atheism, I bought myself a rather tasteless ham sandwich,
and so partook for the first time of the forbidden flesh of the swine.
No thunderbolt arrived to strike me down . . . From that day to this I
have thought of myself as a wholly secular person. Salman Rushdie
The Sanity Inspector wrote:
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> Books choose their authors; the act of creation is not
> entirely a rational and conscious one.
> -- Salman Rushdie
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> --
> bruce
> The dignified don't even enter in the game.
> --The Jam
--
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The Sanity Inspector
just wrote!
>God, Satan, Paradise, and Hell all vanished one day in my fifteenth
>year, when I quite abruptly lost my faith . . . and afterwards, to prove
>my new-found atheism, I bought myself a rather tasteless ham sandwich,
>and so partook for the first time of the forbidden flesh of the swine.
>No thunderbolt arrived to strike me down . . . From that day to this I
>have thought of myself as a wholly secular person. Salman Rushdie
That must have been from his pre-fatwa days.
Obquote:
Cronenberg: Are you good at religion, are you religious?
Rushdie: No, I am totally without religion. I was brought up in a
family where religion was just not around. And it just faded in me.
However, I am very interested in it. Because if you grow up in India
and you spend all your life writing about India you actually can't
write about India without writing about religion.
C: Why did I read that you had converted to Islam?
R: Five years ago there was a moment when I made a stupid mistake and
when I was approached by a number of British Muslims here who sort of
seduced me into making some statement of support for the faith, and
said that if I were to do this then in return there would be a rapid
amelioration of the situation. I said very stupid things for a couple
of weeks.
C: Uh huh.
R: It's one of those things that you get seduced into for good
reasons, where you think, "OK, I will show these people I am not their
enemy, I want to calm things down." And that sucks you towards saying
things which you shouldn't say because they happen not to be what you
think, you know? Yeah. The moment I made the statement it immediately
made me feel physically sick because I felt that in some way I had
lost my language. Up to that point the one thing that kept me going
was that I could defend everything I said and I could talk about it in
my ordinary language and not have to use any kind of special guarded
phrases, you know, just talk. And suddenly I found myself in this
compromised position. So very rapidly I took steps to say, "Look, this
was a mistake and this is not my position, and while I'm not hostile
to Muslims at large, I could not really, truthfully, call myself
Muslim.
-- interview, http://www.davidcronenberg.de/cr_rushd.htm
libreria
> God, Satan, Paradise, and Hell all vanished one day in my fifteenth
> year, when I quite abruptly lost my faith . . . and afterwards, to
> prove my new-found atheism, I bought myself a rather tasteless ham
> sandwich, and so partook for the first time of the forbidden flesh of
> the swine. No thunderbolt arrived to strike me down . . . From that
> day to this I have thought of myself as a wholly secular person.
> Salman Rushdie
And reversing the drift...
My process, as a writer, is to be the servant of the idea .Writing is
about opening the doors of perception.
~Salman Rushdie on the writer's craft - speaking at a
residency of the Royal Shakespeare Company in Michigan, US (March 2003)
libreria
____________________________
Tom
> You can't want to be a writer, you have to be one.
> -- Paul Theroux
"I don't want people who want to dance. I want people who have to dance."
--George Balanchine
Tom Parsons
--
--
t...@panix.com | "Know thyself"?
| If I knew myself I'd run away.
http://www.panix.com/~twp | --Goethe
Tom
> My process, as a writer, is to be the servant of the idea .Writing is
> about opening the doors of perception.
> ~Salman Rushdie on the writer's craft - speaking at a
> residency of the Royal Shakespeare Company in Michigan, US (March 2003)
When people ask me where I get my ideas, I tell them that my ideas get me.
--Robertson Davies (paraphrased)
The Sanity Inspector
me. Years of all sorts had gone by. The annunciation had long since
tolled and the response was slow awakening. Much remained to do and
become, if there was time. Some are born whole; others must seek this
blessed state in a struggle to achieve order. That is no loss to
speak of; ultimately such seeking becomes the subject matter of
fiction. Observing, reading, thinking, one invents himself. A
familiar voice asks: Who am I, and how can I say what I have to? He
reads his sentences to see if the words answer the question. Thus the
writer may tell his fortune. His imagination impels him to speak in
several tongues though one is sufficient. At this point he, or she,
may begin to write a story, a daring endeavor.
-- Bernard Malamud, _The Stories of Bernard Malamud_, 1983
Frank Lynch
Hotel---, Leroy muses on Kraft, the writer:
It’s a curious kind of partnership. . . . As time has passed, each
of us has found himself liberated by the other . . . each of us has
found that to a certain degree, he has become what he is through the
agency of the other.
- David Behrens, on Eric Kraft and his character Leroy
http://www.erickraft.com/markdorset/topicalguide/krafteric.html
Frank Lynch
The Samuel Johnson Sound Bite Page is at:
http://www.samueljohnson.com/