WRITING IS ACTUALLY READING

'The writer David Lodge once noted that 90 percent of what we call writing is actually reading. It's going back over your work so you can change and improve it.'

David Brooks, How to Know a Person, p.167.

COULD I BE A WRITER?

'A well-known writer got collared by a university student who asked, "Do you think I could be a writer?"

"Well," the writer said, "I don't know...Do you like sentences?"

The writer could see the student's amazement. Sentences? Do I like sentences? I am twenty years old and do I like sentences? If he had liked sentences, of course, he could begin, like a joyful painter I knew. I asked him how he came to be a painter. He said, "I liked the smell of paint."'

Annie Dillard, The Writing Life, p.70.

THE CHALLENGES OF WRITING

'I do not so much write a book as sit up with it, as with a dying friend. During visiting hours, I enter its room with dread and sympathy for its many disorders. I hold its hand, and hope it will get better.

This tender relationship can change in a twinkling. If you skip a visit or two, a work in progress can turn on you.

A work in progress quickly becomes feral. It reverts to a wild state overnight. It is barely domesticated, a musing on which you one day fastened a halter, but which you now cannot catch. It is a lion you cage in your study. As the work grows, it gets harder to control; it is a lion growing in strength. You can visit it every day and reassert you mastery over it. If you skip a day, you are, quite rightly, afraid to open the door to its room. You enter its room with bravura, holding a chair at the thing and shouting, "Simba!"'

Annie Dillard, The Writing Life, p.52.

BEING A WRITER

'All writers are vain, selfish and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives there lies a mystery. Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a bout of some painful illness.'

George Orwell, 'Why I Write' in Essays, p.6.

GOOD LANGUAGE CREATES

'It is the very nature of language to form rather than inform. When language is personal, which it is at its best, it reveals; and revelation is always formative - we don't know more, we become more. Our best users of language, poets and lovers and children and saints, use words to make - make intimacies, make character, make beauty, make goodness, make truth.'

Eugene H Peterson, Eat this Book: a conversation in the art of spiritual reading, p.24.

THE POINT OF WRITING

'...I write to be read.'
Madeleine L'Engle, A Circle of Quiet, p.20.

READING/ WRITING SOMETHING VS. CREATING/ APPRECIATING AN OBJECT OF ART

'Reading text is a linear progression where one idea follows another like the news crawl at the bottom of a television screen. On the positive side, this gives a writer significant control of the step-by-step process through which a reader accesses ideas. On the downside, only one thought can be presented at a time.The remainder of the author's composition is either receding into the netherworld of memory or invisibly waiting in the wings for its moment on stage. In contrast, a craft object, is a collage in which many pieces and levels of information are read in relationship to each other in the present...A craftsman cannot control a respondent's path through this information as tightly as as an author, but the craftsman has the advantage of making complex structures of information simultaneously apparent. His picture is worth the proverbial thousand words.' 

Peter Korn, Why We Make Things & Why It Matters, p.64. 

WHAT EXPERIENCE DO WRITERS NEED?

'We hear a great deal of lamentation these days about writers having all taken themselves to the colleges and universities where they live decorously instead of going out and getting firsthand information about life. The fact is that anybody who has survived his childhood has enough information about life to last him the rest of his days. If you can't make something out of a little experience, you probably won't be able to make it out of a lot. The writer's business is to contemplate experience, not to be merged in it.' 

Flannery O'Connor, 'The Nature and Aim of Fiction' in Mystery and Manners, p.84. 

THE LIMITS OF FICTION

'It's always wrong of course to say that you can't do this or that in fiction. You can do anything you can get away with, but nobody has ever got away with much.' 

Flannery O'Connor, 'The Nature and Aim of Fiction' in Mystery and Manners, p.76. 

WHAT MAKES WRITING ENGAGING?

'A lady who writes, and whom I admire very much, wrote me that she had learned from Flaubert that it takes at least three activated sensuous strokes to make on object real; and she believes that this is connected with us having five senses. If you're deprived of any of them, you're in a bad way, but if you're deprived of more than two at once, you almost aren't present.' 

Flannery O Connor, 'The Nature and Aim of Fiction' in Mystery & Manners, p.69. 

WRITING

'Writing is really about structure and traffic management. If you don't have the structure right, nothing else will happen.'

David Brooks, The Second Mountain, p.127.  

WRITING AS THERAPY

'Those of who are writers work out our stuff in public, even under the guise of pretending to write about someone else. In other words, we try to teach what it is that we really need to learn.' 

David Brooks, The Second Mountain, p.xx.  

EFFECTIVE COMMUNICATION

'When you can assume that your audience holds the same beliefs you do, you can relax a little and use more normal means of talking to it; when you have to assume that it does not, then you have to make your vision apparent by shock - to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures.' 

Flannery O'Connor, 'The Fiction Writer & His Country' in Manners & Mystery, p.34. 

THE BENEFITS OF WRITING

'We are still not entirely aware of what writing, good writing, can do for individuals and for the collective. We have at our hands' reach a skill that is also a spiritual discipline. Writing is a meditation; writing is as close as some of us can come to prayer; writing is a way of being, righteously, in the world. And this is something that everyone ought to know.' 

Mark Edmundson, Why Write? p.xix. 

WHY WRITE?

'Why write? A writer needs a strong passion to change things, not just to reflect or report them as they are.' 

Roger Deakin, Notes from Walnut Tree Farm, p.120. 

WRITING

'...it is always fatal, I have found, when you have something of your own to write, to get too close to someone else's music. It gets into your lungs like secondary smoking.'

Clive James, Latest Readings, p.164. 

WRITING

'The way I write my novels can best be described as imagining that I'm going into the kitchen to fry a couple of eggs and then find myself cooking up a banquet. Starting with very simple things, they then word-associate themselves with further things until I'm up and running and eager to find out the nest surprise, the next hour, the next day or the next week.'

Ray Bradbury, Farewell Summer, p.163. 

WRITING

'This book, like most of my books and stories, was a surprise. I began to learn the nature of such surprises, thank God, when I was fairly young as a writer. Before that, like every beginner, I thought you could beat, pummel, and thrash an idea into existence. Under such treatment, of course, any decent idea folds up its paws, turns its back, fixes its eyes on eternity, and dies.'

Ray Bradbury, Dandelion Wine, p.vii.

WRITING

'Writing is an act of community. It is a letter, it is comforting, consoling, helping, advising on our part as well as asking for it on yours. It is part of our human association with each other. It is an expression of our love and concern for each other.'

Dorothy Day in David Brooks, The Road to Character, p.98.

WRITING BOOKS

'Someone might say that no-one should write a book until he is in full possession of the quarry he seeks, but in that case no one should write a book, because in this life knowledge comes little by little.' 

J Budziszewski, On the Meaning of Sex, p.11.