I thought I’d read about the craft of writing for this month’s challenge.
Quotation of the Day for March 19, 2008
“I suspect I have spent just about exactly as much time actually writing as the average person my age has spent watching television, and that, as much as anything, may be the real secret here.”
– William Gibson, writer
I don’t think William Gibson’s quite nailed it. If I sat and wrote for as long as the average person watches television I still doubt there’d be much in there that would be publishable — and if there were, it would be nonfiction almost certainly.
The art and craft of fiction writing is mysterious. All the authors in the book I read — Writers on Writing: Collected Essays from The New York Times — pretty much agree. Nobody could, or would admit to, the faintest inkling of where their ideas come from. Some sit each day and study others’ writing, some meditate, some follow their dog around — it’s all very entertaining to contemplate — but the headwaters of the stream of fiction remain a pleasing mystery.
From the book’s essays, I think Kent Haruf (p.89) comes closest to a cogent explanation of the craft of writing:
Still, I have to say, writing is all messier and more a matter of dead ends and fits and starts than a recitation like this one makes it out to be. And perhaps because writing fiction — this weird practice of telling artful lies, this peculiar habit of inventing imaginary people who talk and move and sleep and dream and wake up and kick and kiss one another — is so bizarre in itself is the reason why writers have to find bizarre ways to make it possible even to consider doing it.
So of course they have to write in their underwear and face the backs of dressers. Of course they have to pull stocking caps down over their faces. Otherwise they might as well do something practical and ordinary, become doctors and lawyers and ditch diggers like everyone else.