May 17. Visiting my blog after an absence of a couple of months. Looking at the date of this last post, my mother would have been 96 on March 18. She would have loved that Vivaldi’s Gloria was posted on my site on her birthday. One of the most vivid memories I have is of her listening to the radio as she worked at her cutting table in front of a window overlooking the street.
“My working method has more often than not involved the subtraction of weight. I have tried to remove weight, sometimes from people, sometimes from heavenly bodies, sometimes from cities; above all I have tried to remove weight from the structure of stories and from language.” – Italo Calvino
Tags: Craft, on Writing, self-Creation, structure
With fiction, there’s no reason why everything you write shouldn’t be amazing.
Nobody’s stopping you from making up better stuff. – Wells Tower
“…I realized that I would greatly prefer to think of literature as a profession, an art, a science, or pretty much anything else, rather than a craft. What did craft ever try to say about the world, the human condition, or the search for meaning? All it had were its negative dictates: ‘Show, don’t tell’; ‘Murder your darlings’; ‘Omit needless words.’ As if writing were a matter of overcoming bad habits—of omitting needless words.” Elif Batuman
and yet can we write without it?
Tags: Craft, Literature, on Writing, Story, structure
Haunted by the first chapter of Holly Black’s White Cat novel (published on her blog). I can’t quite get over the fact that it moved around so much and at the same time kept the reader’s attention on a single trajectory. That it accomplished back story and in media res, sometimes in the same sentence. That I often had no idea what she was talking about and yet I wanted to understand. Brilliant.
What it’s made me understand is how linearly I think about the writing process. And how I still separate idea from craft from art, even though I don’t mean to or don’t think that’s what I’m doing. I keep forgetting: there’s only one thing happening.
Tags: on Writing, Singularity, Story, structure