Three quotes on writing
There are things that I appreciate being reminded of… I recently opened a commonplace book I had on my desk, to the first page and read the following from Verlyn Klinkenborg’s Several Short Sentences About Writing:
Being a writer is an art of perpetual self-authorization.
No matter who you are.
Only you can authorize yourself.
You do that by writing well, by constant discovery.
No one else can authorize you.
No one.
This doesn’t happen overnight.
It’s as gradual as the improvement in your writing.
I came across this quote by David Foster Wallace, on a page I photocopied from Zadie Smith’s book Changing my Mind (p 257). It feels especially pertinent with the advent of A.I.:
I’ve gotten convinced that there’s something kind of timelessly vital and sacred about good writing. This thing doesn’t have that much to do with talent, even glittering talent… Talent’s just an instrument. It’s like having a pen that works instead of one that doesn’t. I’m not saying I’m able to work consistently out of the premise, but it seems like the big distinction between good art and so-so art lies somewhere in the art’s heart’s purpose, the agenda of the consciousness behind the text. It’s got something to do with love. With having the discipline to talk out of the part of yourself that can love instead of the part that just wants to be loved. I know this doesn’t sound hip at all… But it seems like one of the things really great fiction-writers do - from Carver to Chekhov to Flannery O’Connor, or like the Tolstoy of The death of Ivan Ilych or the Pynchon of Gravity’s Rainbow - is to “give” the reader something. The reader walks away from the real art heavier than she came into it. Fuller. All the attention and engagement and work you need to get from the reader can’t be for your benefit; it’s got to be for hers. […] Maybe it’s as simple as trying to make the writing more generous and less ego-driven.
(The interview can be found here.)
And finally, a little quote from Brenda Ueland:
I have a kind of mystical notion. I think it is only by expressing all that is inside that purer and purer streams come. It is so in writing. You are taught in school to put down on paper only the bright things. Wrong. Pour out the dull things on paper too - you can tear them up afterward - for only then do the bright ones come. If you hold back the dull things, you are certain to hold back what is clear and beautiful and true and lively. So it is with people who have not been listened to in the right way - with affection and a kind of jolly excitement. Their creative fountain has been blocked. Only superficial talk comes out - what is prissy or gushing or merely nervous. No one has called out of them, by wonderful listening, what is true and alive.
Cooking
This week, we tried Priya Krishna’s “Kaddu” (Sweet and Sour Butternut Squash) and I made a loaf of bread to go along with the meal. Did you know that butternut squash produces a resin-like liquid that can coat your skin almost as permanently? I had no idea until I noticed my left-hand index looking shiny and feeling numb. I wonder if the recipe should not have come with a warning!
Enjoying
“Even a moment’s grown-up reflection reveals a very obvious, pretty dull truth to us: most people in the past were not less morally enlightened than us. They were the same — they just lived in a different world, with different structures of oppression.” From an article by Paul Sagar.
Playing Pictionary. I found a first edition at a thrift store last fall and it’s become one of our go-to games when family is visiting. Age doesn’t matter, and we’re either laughing because competition reveals that one of our kids draws something that looks exactly like a carry-on, while yours looks like a lumpy toaster popped a lumpy slice of bread; or else we’re amazed with the other one’s execution of “Middle East”. Rather than using paper, we take a large piece of dry-erase board and set it down on the dining room table and use it from one game to the next.
The Thinking Game. I’m familiar with many of the events that form the chronology of this documentary, but seeing them presented as they are here was more satisfying than I expected.
I liked watching how Brook Cormier took a travel experience and made it into a meaningful piece of art for her husband and their home.
I appreciated how The Ezra Klein Show recently interviewed a person who could provide some context for the war in Iran in the person of Ali Vaez.
I’m in a season of decluttering, making my way through an accumulation of paper and the organization of an office space. Coincidentally, my mother-in-law is downsizing. Freeing up space and putting things in order is a thing I put off, even though I often enjoy doing it. Learning that Margareta Magnusson of The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning died earlier this week made me smile to think that her practical ideas live on… “And people should start early. If your things are in order, then you don’t have to waste time looking for them.” (In my experience, nothing takes longer than paper-related clutter…)
I remember first coming across the recommendation for If You Want To Write so many years ago that when I think back to it, the internet by which it was recommended had a different flavour than it does today. Had I thought to google the author’s name to tether the questions she raised in my mind? Was the search unfruitful? Today, I googled Brenda Ueland and came across this article by Alice Kaplan in The American Scholar, (published September 1, 2007) and thoroughly enjoyed reading it. Kaplan gives this criticism of Ueland’s writing: “Her biography of Clara (published posthumously under the title O Clouds, Unfold!), a sentimental series of sketches written in the first person, put together with whatever materials came to hand, shows Ueland’s strengths and her failings as a writer. She was headstrong, charming, disorganized, and enthusiastic, without much distance from her own feelings.”
Postcards
The weather was cold, then windy. There was a snowstorm, then melt. What is enchanting is hearing the songbirds, feeling the glare of a bright sun, and seeing blue skies and impeccably white snow from a fresh snowfall. I can’t quite capture it, but here is a blue sky!
Also… the geese are back! (Since last week!)
Happy Sunday!