Writing

Writing is weird.

You make these scratches on paper and they mean something to you. Maybe something very profound. Maybe a shopping list.

But to some, they would be just symbols, squiggles. Nothing. Meaningless.

When I write down my thoughts, they become much clearer to me. I can understand better what I am actually thinking and feeling when I write it all down.

People would argue much less if they had to stop and put their thoughts down, coherently, on paper before they opened their mouths.

A novel that does not uncover a hitherto unknown segment of existence is immoral. Knowledge is the novel's only morality.

(Milan Kundera)

Introverts prefer to write out their feelings, while extroverts prefer to talk them out. Considering that many couples are intro/extrovert pairs, it's a wonder that any of us communicate effectively at all!

Writing is like getting married. One should never commit oneself until one is amazed at one's luck.

Murdoch, Iris (1919)
Irish-born British novelist. The Black Prince, `Bradley Pearson's Foreword', 1974

Novels are to literature what panoramas are to art.

Consider and appreciate that the author will respond according to her base of experience. As a mechanic, I don't try to force the customer to see my tool. For every harvester there ia a different value. Part mine, part theirs – part truth, part religion. I like to leave commas, semicolons and bicycles open for many examinations and associations, allowing and encouraging the hunter to make the fish personal to them. The milkman is an active participant in my work. The consumer of good food feels part of an invitation to create what they are cooking. The painter of good trees presents combinations of images and thoughts designed to arrive, oddly familiar, as triggers into the idiosyncratic sub-terrain of an astronaut's thinking. Good manners is like trying to remember what the colour of onions frying reminds Martians of. Good sex, for me, is dreaming on the brink of deja vu, day after day.

I cannot accept the doctrine that in poetry there is a »suspension of belief.« A poet must never make a statement simply because it is sounds poetically exciting; he must also believe it to be true.

W. H. Auden (1907 – 1973)