Abrams Noterie - The Truth About Writing

THIS STORY IN MY HEAD IS TOO HOT TO TOUCH. I GRABBED IT ANYWAY. ADELE GRIFFIN We writers are crafty people: We practice an ancient and honored craft by crafting sentences that can inform, entertain, and arouse readers. And, at times, we also write squibs intended to cover our own hindquarters. Our trade is the only one of the classic arts which, by the very practice of our craft, we can explain, elaborate, correct, even defend and stump for our efforts. A sculptor cant chisel why he chose to use Carrara rather than Parian marble, a composer cant in musical notes expound on why her symphony lacks a scherzo, nor can a painter limn a defense of personal theories about line, color, and form.

Were historicallyand always at our corestorytellers; yet, with a single word we can cease spinning yarns for philosophizing on whatever the devil flits through our brains (such as why were writing what were writing in the first place); we can interrupt our tale by theorizing on whatever might clarify, intensify, or indemnify it. In my books, Ive long wished to preempt an expected critical comment by, say, thwarting a complaint about the vocabulary of my writing at times possibly being needlessly esoteric. Ive wanted to say, Come on, dear readers! Relax and have some fun! Maybe even pick up a damn dictionary and look up a word! Vocabulary building is gratifying. I havent actually written those words until just this moment, but Im happy now to have had the chance at last to set them loose. So you see, capable reader, in this paragraph Im doing the very thing Im talking about: demonstratingif not provingmy contention: Writers are crafty folk. This collection of literary delights from more than 270 writersthat term here meaning anyone who has written poignantly on some aspect of writingdoes, of course, address other components of our naturally apothegmatic craft.

Within these pages youll find maxims, aphorisms, adages, gnomes, axioms, scholia, bromides, principles, and even a number of self-evident truths. The best are pungent, eloquent, profound, indelible, amusing, heartfelt, and perhaps most important, truthful. I didnt happen upon any I consider utter bunkum. (Well, there was one.) If youre beginning the craft of verbal composition, youll likely come upon several notions able to help you along toward becoming the writer you dream of being. My own experience of learning to write was largely directed by well-intentioned instructors who had no practical experience beyond office memos, grocery lists, or letters to a kid at camp, as well as by editors whose familiarity with the classics of our language was scarcely beyond a high school survey course in English literature. During those apprentice years I encountered wordsmiths who knew the proven classics, scriveners who understood how it is that words can move from the mundane to the immortal.

Some of such counsel is within these pages. This collection can be a pocket companion dedicated to crafting ideas into well-turned phrasings, and its also an alert to inherent pitfalls, challenges, agonies, and (occasionally) the triumphs of language wedded to emotion, truth, and yes, indeed, beauty. William Least Heat-Moon

Who am I? What right have I to speak? Who will listen to me if I do? Youre a human being, with a unique story to tell, and you have every right. If you speak with passion, many of us will listen. We need stories to live, all of us. We live by story.

Yours enlarges the circle. RICHARD RHODES You write for the people in high school who ignored you. We all do it. CAROLYN KIZER Who wants to become a writer? And why? Because its the answer to everything. Its the streaming reason for living. To note, to pin down, to build up, to create, to be astonished at nothing, to cherish the oddities, to let nothing go down the drain, to make something, to make a great flower out of life, even if its a cactus.

ENID BAGNOLD We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect. ANAS NIN
(contributed by Marisa Siegel, The Rumpus) Writers will happen in the best of families. RITA MAE BROWN Most of the basic material a writer works with is acquired before the age of fifteen. WILLA CATHER IF I HAD ALWAYS SLEPT PROPERLY, ID NEVER HAVE WRITTEN A LINE. LOUIS-FERDINAND CLINE Writing is not like dancing or modeling; its not something whereif you missed it by age nineteenyoure finished. Its never too late.

Your writing will only get better as you get older and wiser. If you write something beautiful and important, and the right person somehow discovers it, they will clear room for you on the bookshelves of the worldat any age. ELIZABETH GILBERT I write because I cannot not write. CHARLOTTE BRONT Words, so innocent and powerless as they are, as standing in a dictionary, how potent for good and evil they become in the hands of one who knows how to combine them. NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE Writers have this narcissistic obsession about how we got to be who we are. SANDRA CISNEROS I love being a writer.

What I cant stand is the paperwork. PETER DE VRIES If you were a member of Jesse James band and people asked you what you were, you wouldnt say, Well, Im a desperado. Youd say something like I work in banks or Ive done some railroad work. It took me a long time just to say, Im a writer. Its really embarrassing. ROY BLOUNT, JR.

I tend to believe all writers are cartographers and we are mapping human experiences. ROXANE GAY As far as Im concerned, the entire reason for becoming a writer is not having to get up in the morning. NEIL GAIMAN The writer is a mysterious figure, wandering lonely as a cloud, fired by inspiration, or perhaps a cocktail or two. SARA SHERIDAN

... BECAUSE I am curious. I am curious about me.

PAT MORA ... TO become someone elsethat better, smarter self that lives inside my dumbstruck twin. DORIANNE LAUX ... BECAUSE Im afraid to say some things out loud. GORDAN ATKINSON ... TO save someones life, probably my own.

CLARICE LISPECTOR Getting even is one reason for writing. WILLIAM H. GASS Find out the reason that commands you to write; see whether it has spread its roots into the very depth of your heart; confess to yourself you would have to die if you were forbidden to write. RAINER MARIA RILKE Youre not going into the Im-a-born-newspaperman-with-ink-in-my-veins-instead-of-blood speech, are you? WHIT MASTERSON Everywhere I go, I find a poet has been there before me. SIGMUND FREUD Being a writer is like having homework every night for the rest of your life. LAWRENCE KASDAN Resign yourself to the lifelong sadness that comes from never being satisfied.

ZADIE SMITH IF IT DOESNT FEEL AT SOME POINT LIKE PEELING OFF YOUR OWN SKIN, YOURE PROBABLY NOT BEING HONEST ENOUGH. MELISSA FEBOS IF YOU ARENT GONNA SAY EXACTLY HOW AND WHAT YOU FEEL, YOU MIGHT AS WELL NOT SAY ANYTHING AT ALL. JOHNNY CASH A poet is a man who manages, in a lifetime of standing out in thunderstorms, to be struck by lightning five or six times. RANDALL JARRELL Poetry creates the myth, the prose writer draws its portrait. JEAN-PAUL SARTRE I remember that it bothered my father very much that I wanted to write. With the best of intentions, he thought that writing would bring destruction to the family and myself and, especially, that it would lead me to a life of complete uselessness.