Metaphor by Metaphor » Quotations

Austin suggested this for us

sdgibson — Tue, 01 Mar 2011 19:39:09 +0000

A few years ago for NaNoWriMo, Neil Gaiman sent the following email to hopeful NaNo’s, I thought it may be helpful to the class:

Dear NaNoWriMo Author,

By now you’re probably ready to give up. You’re past that first fine furious rapture when every character and idea is new and entertaining. You’re not yet at the momentous downhill slide to the end, when words and images tumble out of your head sometimes faster than you can get them down on paper. You’re in the middle, a little past the half-way point. The glamour has faded, the magic has gone, your back hurts from all the typing, your family, friends and random email acquaintances have gone from being encouraging or at least accepting to now complaining that they never see you any more—and that even when they do you’re preoccupied and no fun. You don’t know why you started your novel, you no longer remember why you imagined that anyone would want to read it, and you’re pretty sure that even if you finish it it won’t have been worth the time or energy and every time you stop long enough to compare it to the thing that you had in your head when you began—a glittering, brilliant, wonderful novel, in which every word spits fire and burns, a book as good or better than the best book you ever read—it falls so painfully short that you’re pretty sure that it would be a mercy simply to delete the whole thing.

Welcome to the club.

That’s how novels get written.

You write. That’s the hard bit that nobody sees. You write on the good days and you write on the lousy days. Like a shark, you have to keep moving forward or you die. Writing may or may not be your salvation; it might or might not be your destiny. But that does not matter. What matters right now are the words, one after another. Find the next word. Write it down. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat.

A dry-stone wall is a lovely thing when you see it bordering a field in the middle of nowhere but becomes more impressive when you realise that it was built without mortar, that the builder needed to choose each interloc king stone and fit it in. Writing is like building a wall. It’s a continual search for the word that will fit in the text, in your mind, on the page. Plot and character and metaphor and style, all these become secondary to the words. The wall-builder erects her wall one rock at a time until she reaches the far end of the field. If she doesn’t build it it won’t be there. So she looks down at her pile of rocks, picks the one that looks like it will best suit her purpose, and puts it in.

The search for the word gets no easier but nobody else is going to write your novel for you.

The last novel I wrote (it was ANANSI BOYS, in case you were wondering) when I got three-quarters of the way through I called my agent. I told her how stupid I felt writing something no-one would ever want to read, how thin the characters were, how pointless the plot. I strongly suggested that I was ready to abandon this book and write something else instead, or perhaps I cou ld abandon the book and take up a new life as a landscape gardener, bank-robber, short-order cook or marine biologist. And instead of sympathising or agreeing with me, or blasting me forward with a wave of enthusiasm—or even arguing with me—she simply said, suspiciously cheerfully, “Oh, you’re at that part of the book, are you?”

I was shocked. “You mean I’ve done this before?”

“You don’t remember?”

“Not really.”

“Oh yes,” she said. “You do this every time you write a novel. But so do all my other clients.” I didn’t even get to feel unique in my despair.

So I put down the phone and drove down to the coffee house in which I was writing the book, filled my pen and carried on writing.

One word after another.

That’s the only way that novels get written and, short of elves coming in the night and turning your jumbled notes in to Chapter Nine, it’s the only way to do it.

So keep on keeping on. Write another word and then another.

Pretty soon you’ll be on the downward slide, and it’s not impossible that soon you’ll be at the end. Good luck…

Neil Gaiman

– Neil Gaiman is the author of the New York Times bestselling children’s book Coraline and of the picture books The Wolves in the Walls and The Day I Swapped My Dad for Two Goldfish. He is also the author of award-winning novels and short stories for adults, as well as the Sandman series of graphic novels. His most recent novels include InterWorld and Anansi Boys . For more info on Neil, visitwww.neilgaiman.com

William Faulkner

sdgibson — Tue, 26 Oct 2010 18:54:37 +0000

I only write when I am inspired. Fortunately, I am inspired at 9 o’clock every morning.

Bernard Malamud on what writing does

sdgibson — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 17:03:54 +0000

My writing has drawn, out of a reluctant soul, a measure of astonishment at the nature of life.

Julie Myerson on the pleasures of writing

sdgibson — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 20:48:59 +0000

Writing gives me such enormous pleasure, and I’m a much happier (and therefore nicer) person when I’m doing it. There’s a place in my head that I go to when I write and it’s so rich and unexpected – and scary sometimes – but never ever dull. I first went there when I was seven and I wrote a poem which startled me a bit because it felt like someone else had written it. The adrenaline rush that gave me was incredible and I wanted more. These days, maybe because I can now access that place quite easily, writing feels like something I simply could not live without. It is a joyous thing. I feel very lucky to be paid to do it, but even if I’d never been published, I think I’d still be writing. I love being read, but the person I’m really always writing for is me.

Form and desire

sdgibson — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 17:21:39 +0000

[Form is] an arousing and fulfillment of desire. A work has form insofar as one part of it leads a reader to anticipate another part, to be gratified by the sequence.

–Kenneth Burke

Ronan Bennett on the pleasures of writing

sdgibson — Sun, 30 Aug 2009 01:16:07 +0000

I am not a tortured writer. Sometimes the writing does not go well and I can feel frustrated and disappointed with myself. Sometimes I do not feel like writing and sometimes I lose faith in what I’m writing. But I take a pretty robust view about all this because I tend to believe it will become good eventually. I’m not sure I would describe as pleasurable the actual process of writing, even when it’s going well, but when I know in my bones that I’ve written a good book, like The Catastrophist or Havoc, in Its Third Year, I do certainly feel on a high. Good reviews please me, but nothing like as much as meeting readers who tell me they were moved or provoked by one of my books. To enjoy a certain level of public regard, the support of publishers and to be financially rewarded – if this is not a pleasure it’s at least a rare privilege.

Will Self on the pleasures of writing

sdgibson — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 16:49:33 +0000

I gain nothing but pleasure from writing fiction; short stories are foreplay, novellas are heavy petting – but novels are the full monte. Frankly, if I didn’t enjoy writing novels I wouldn’t do it – the world hardly needs any more and I can think of numerous more useful things someone with my skills could be engaged in. As it is, the immersion in parallel but believable worlds satisfies all my demands for vicarious experience, voyeurism and philosophic calisthenics. I even enjoy the mechanics of writing, the dull timpani of the typewriter keys, the making of notes – many notes – and most seductive of all: the buying of stationery. That the transmogrification of my beautiful thoughts into a grossly imperfect prose is always the end result doesn’t faze me: all novels are only a version- there is no Platonic ideal. But I’d go further still: fiction is my way of thinking about and relating to the world; if I don’t write I’m not engaged in any praxis, and lose all purchase.