I don’t want to write the sort of memoir that slags people off and takes vengeance, I don’t admire writers who do that. It’s cheap, angry.
Catalog
Quotes tagged ‘On Writing’
Google 'How to Become a Writer' and you will get 360 million hits, and none of them will be useful.
Nothing has really happened until it has been described.
Paradoxically, vividness of description and detail here comes at the expense of realism. To put it simply, no one besides a writer—a professional noticer—notices this much, and certainly not in a near instantaneous time frame; not in a “taking in.” There is no reason to. This style of writing, which…
As with writing, the silence says as much, or more, than the word.
Description is, in fact, more useful for what it says about the noticer than the noticed.
I kept always two books in my pocket, one to read, one to write in.
What he created shaped us.
I think that book has helped so many of us stick to our guns and keep at it. That’s a book that was so empowering. He was so eloquent and incisive in that book. Here he is, larger-than-life Stephen King, and yet there he is across from you, telling you to chill out and work.
I’m sometimes asked how I would like to be remembered. I’ve had a diverse career as a writer, underwater explorer, space promoter and science populariser. Of all these, I want to be remembered most as a writer — one who entertained readers, and, hopefully, stretched their imagination as well.
What this means for the true novelist is that he or she must continue to soldier on, keep writing, keep trying, taking the increasingly painful hits of rejection after rejection until, well, until someone out there catches on…or doesn’t.
What happened to the writer is not what matters; what matters is the large sense that the writer is able to make of what happened.
Suppress no urge, douse no flame, do not be shy.
How does my story get closer to us?
Do you know, yet, what you're writing about? Do you know what is at stake?
One who writes memoir wishes to step into that light, not to see one's own face—that is not possible—but to feel the length of shadow cast by the night.
True memoir is written, like all literature, in an attempt to find not only a self but a world.
If we learn not only to tell our stories but to listen to what our stories tell us—to write the first draft and then return for the second draft—we are doing the work of memory.
For meaning is not "attached" to the detail by the memoirist; meaning is revealed.
Seeking the congruence between stored image and hidden emotion—that's the real job of memoir.