Bookmarker tag: advice/writing (82 notes)

[...] Look, if the contemporary condition is hopelessly shitty, insipid, materialistic, emotionally retarded, sadomasochistic and stupid, then I (or any writer) can get away with slapping together stories with characters who are stupid, vapid, emotionally retarded, which is easy, because these sorts of characters require no development. With descriptions that are simply lists of brand-name consumer products. Where stupid people say insipid stuff to each other. If what's always distinguished bad writing—flat characters, a narrative World that's cliched and not recognizably human, etc.—is also a description of today's world, then bad writing becomes an ingenious mimesis of a bad world, If readers simply believe the world is stupid and shallow and mean, then Ellis can write a mean shallow stupid novel that becomes a mordant deadpan commentary on the badness of everything. Look man, we'd probably most of us agree that these are dark times, and stupid ones, but do we need fiction that does nothing but dramatize how dark and stupid everything is? In dark times, the definition of good art would seem to be art that locates and applies CPR to those elements of what's human and magical that still live and glow despite the times' darkness. Really good fiction could have as dark a worldview as it wished, but it'd find a way both to depict this dark world and to illuminate the possibilities for being alive and human in it. You can defend Psycho as being a sort of performative digest of late-eighties social problems, but it's no more than that.

[...] Fiction's about what it is to be a fucking human being. If you operate, which most of us do, from the premise that there are things about the contemporary U.S. that make it distinctively hard to be a real human being, then maybe half of fiction's job is to dramatize what it is that makes it tough. The other half is to dramatize the fact that we still are human beings, now. Or can be. This isn't that it's fiction's duty to edify or teach, or to make us good little Christians or Republicans. I'm not trying to line up behind Tolstoy or Gardner. I just think that fiction that isnt exploring what it means to be human today isn't good art. We've got all this "literary" fiction that simply monotones that we're all becoming less and less human, that presents characters with souls or love, characters who really are exhaustively describable in terms of what brands of stuff they wear, and we all buy the books and go like "Golly, what a mordantly effective commentary on contemporary materialism!" But we already all know U.S. culture is materialistic. This diagnosis can be done in about two lines. It doesn't engage anybody. What's engaging and artistically real, is, taking it as axiomatic that the present is grotesquely materialistic, how is it that we as human beings still have the capacity for joy, charity, genuine connections, for stuff that doesn't have a price? And can these capacities be made to thrive? And if so, how, and if not, why not?

[...] I've found the really tricky discipline to writing is trying to play without getting overcome by insecurity or vanity or ego. Showing the reader that you're smart or funny or talented or whatever, trying to be liked, integrity issues aside, this stuff just doesn't have enough motivational calories in it to carry you over the long haul. You've got to discipline yourself to talk out of the part of you that loves the thing, loves what you're working on. [...] it seems like the big distinction between good art and so-so art lies somewhere in the art's heart's purpose, the agenda of the consciousness behind the text. It's got something to do with love. [...] The reader walks away from real art heavier than she came to it. Fuller. All the attention and engagement and work you need to get from the reader can't be for your benefit; it's got to be for hers. [...] Really good work probably comes out of a willingness to disclose yourself, open yourself up in spiritual and emotional ways that risk making you look banal or melodramatic or naive or unhip or sappy, and to ask to reader really to feel something. To be willing to sort of die in order to move the reader, somehow. [...]

[...] "[...] And strong works of fiction are what refuse to give easy answers to the conflict, to paint things as black and white, good guys versus bad guys. They’re everything that pop psychology is not."

Writing is a form of personal freedom. It frees us from the mass identity we see in the making all around us. In the end, writers will write not to be outlaw heroes of some underculture but mainly to save themselves, to survive as individuals.

What writers have is a license and also the freedom to sit--to sit, clench their fists, and make themselves be excruciatingly aware of the stuff that we're mostly aware of only on a certain level. And that if the writer does his job right, what he basically does is remind the reader of how smart the reader is. Is to wake the reader up to stuff that the reader's been aware of all the time. And it's not a question of the writer having more capacity than the average person. [...] It's that the writer is willing I think to cut off, cut himself off from certain stuff, and develop ... and just, and think real hard. Which not everybody has the luxury to do.

But I gotta tell you, I just think to look across the room and automatically assume that somebody else is less aware than me, or that somehow their interior life is less rich, and complicated, and acutely perceived than mine, makes me not as good a writer. Because that means I'm going to be performing for a faceless audience, instead of trying to have a conversation with a person.

[...] Other people's words are so important. And then without warning they stop being important, along with all those words of yours that their words prompted you to write. Much of the excitement of a new novel lies in the repudiation of the one written before. Other people's words are the bridge you use to cross from where you were to wherever you're going.

[...] the discovery that disciplined fun is more fun than impulsive or hedonistic fun. [...] writing fiction becomes a way to go deep inside yourself an illuminate precisely the stuff you don't want to see or let anyone else see, and this stuff usually turns out (paradoxically) to be precisely the stuff all writers and readers share and respond to, feel. Fiction becomes a weird way to countenance yourself and to tell the truth of instead of being a way to escape yourself or present yourself in a way you figure you will be maximally likable. This process is complicated and confusing and scary, and also hard work, but it turns out to be the best fun there is.

And this is why writing good fiction is almost never easy. The point at which fiction seems to become easy for a writer--and I'll let everyone supply his or her own examples of this--is usually the point at which it's no longer necessary to read that writer. [...] It's a prejudice of mine that literature cannot be a mere performance: that unless the writer is personally at risk--unless the book has been, in some way, for the writer, an adventure into the unknown; unless the writer has set himself or herself a personal problem not easily solved; unless the finished book represents the surmounting of some great resistance--it's not worth reading. Or, for the writer, in my opinion, worth writing.

[...] you don't get any sense of the infinity of choices that were made in the text until you start trying to reproduce them. [...]

A good opener, first and foremost, fails to repel. Right? So it's interesting and engaging. It lays out the terms of the argument, and, in my opinion, should also in some way imply the stakes. Right? Not only am I right, but in any piece of writing there's a tertiary argument: why should you spend your time writing this? right? "so here's why the following issue might be important, useful, practical." I would think that if one did it deftly, one could in a one-paragraph opening grab the reader, state the terms of the argument, and state the motivation for the argument. I imagine most good argumentative stuff that I've read, you could boil that down to the opener.

[...] In order for your sentences not to make the reader's eyes glaze over, you can't simply use the same core set of words, particularly important nouns and verbs, over and over again. You have to have synonyms at your fingertips and alternative constructions at your fingertips. And usually, though not in the sense of memorizing vocab words like we were kids, but having a larger vocabulary is usually the best way to do that. The best. having a good vocabulary ups the chances that we're going to be able to know the right word, even if that's the plainest word that will do and to achieve some kind of elegant variation, which I am kind of a fiend for.

The third is wordplay. Wallace doesn't bend grammar, but he bends English. He loves Germanic compounds like "shingle-sized" (describing pizza slices), "Rice-Krispie-squarish" (describing Krakkles), and "pubic-hair-shaped" (describing Curly Fries). If no existing adjective can do exactly what he wants, he invents one--for instance, "Jetsonian" (describing DIPPIN DOTS). The students, ecumenical scholars of pop culture, all get the reference.

[...]

The fifth is multisensory description. We all have noses, ears, tongues, and skin, but most people write as if they had only eyes. Not Wallace. That's how he makes us feel we're at the fair, not just reading about it. I ask for examples of each sense. Everyone speaks at once. Sound-carpet of deep fryers! Air spicy with antiperspirant and Coppertone! Yummy Elephant Ears! The weird, abstract texture of DIPPIN DOTS! I ask how they'd characterize "the green reek of fried tomatoes" and "bright-yellow popcorn that stinks of salt". It's Yale. At least four students cry out, Synesthesia!

[...] Such is the present paradox of ethics; if I am absorbed in treating a few chosen persons as absolute ends, for example, my wife, my son, my friends, the needy person I happen to come across, if I am bent upon fulfilling all my duties towards them, I shall spend my life doing so; I shall be led to pass over in silence the injustices of the age, the class struggle, colonialism, Anti-Semitism, etc., and, finally, to take advantage of oppression in order to do good. [...] if I throw myself into the revolutionary enterprise I risk having no more leisure for personal relations--worse still, of being led by the logic of the action into treating most men, and even my friends, as means. But if we start with the moral exigence which the aesthetic feeling envelops without meaning to do so, we are starting on the right foot. We must historicize the reader's goodwill, that is, by the formal agency of our work, we must, if possible provoke his intention of treating men, in every case, as an absolute end and, by the subject of our writing, direct his intention upon his neighbours, that is, upon the oppressed of the world. But we shall have accomplished if, in addition, we do not show him--and in the very warp and weft of the work--that it is quite impossible to treat concrete men as ends in contemporary society. Thus, he will be led by the hand until he is made to see that, in effect, what he wants is to eliminate the exploitation of man by man and that the city of ends which, with one stroke, he has set up in the aesthetic intuition is an ideal which we shall approach only at the end of a long historical evolution. In other words, we must transform his formal goodwill into a concrete and material will to change this world by specific means in order to help the coming of the concrete society of ends.

Antonio Gramsci in his prison notebooks has a theory of elaboration, which I think is very important. Gramsci argued that people in a capitalist system absorb ideas from a variety of sources — family, education, media, workplaces — and that the totality of these notions forms what he calls “common sense.” Now this common sense is useful because it explains a great deal about the world as it is — and how it appears. But there are fundamental elements of the world that remain difficult to fully understand. There are contradictions that make no sense.

Gramsci says that the mass of the people experience reality through a contradictory consciousness. Gramsci argues that the communist or the socialist goes among the people, interacts with them, and listens intently to their common sense. Then the communist activist or journalist critically elaborates upon their common sense, takes this contradictory common sense and elaborates it into “good sense” or philosophy. Good socialist nonfiction writing does not assume that it emerges from the genius of the writer or an inspiration — but it comes from being absorbed by the common sense around us, and by being honest about elaborating it into philosophy of good sense.

To come at this from another level: socialist writing is about democracy, about seeing readers as part of our process and not as consumers who must buy the commodities we produce. Socialist writing should be a conversation.

Art cannot by itself change the world. It can provide insight and perhaps an epiphany — but it does not change the relations of power in the world. For that, one needs organizational power and struggle.

But art at the same time must be free to engage with contradictory consciousness without a predetermined end — the ends of politics, for instance. If a political line drives the process of elaboration, then we would know the answer to our question before we began our studies among the people. In order to best understand social relations, socialist writing and art must have freedom to come as close as possible to the contradictory common sense and produce — again in conversation with the people, with one’s comrades — the good sense of our times.

W. E. B Du Bois in Souls of Black Folk asked a question, “How does it feel to be a problem?” This was his detonator sentence. It carried the entire book with it. People of African descent in the United States had been made — through slavery and Jim Crow codes — to experience a subdued dignity. That was Du Bois’s point.

I came at it from a different place. In my second book, Karma of Brown Folk, I developed an argument about race in the United States, and why certain races stood for success while others stood for failure. This hierarchy of races allows white supremacy to make the claim that it is not after all racist.

South Asians in particular, but other Asian Americans as well, entered the United States after 1965 with advanced degrees. Their success story was written by immigration law, so that their “genius” was not through natural selection but by state selection. Nonetheless, South Asians were being positioned, against African Americans, as a success story. Drawing from Du Bois’s detonator sentence, I asked, “How does it feel to be a solution?” That question grounded the book.

One of my other books — The Darker Nations — is about the Third World Project, the political movement of the formerly colonized states on the world stage. The term “Third World” had become resonant with disparagement — state failure, corruption, violence. But this was a phenomenon of the 1980s, when the Third World Project had been, as I wrote, assassinated. From the 1920s to the 1980s, the term referred to that immense struggle to produce an alternative inter-state system. So the detonator sentence for that book — in fact the first sentence — ran, “The Third World is not a place, but a project.” In other words, the disparagement — which is about places in the world that had been reduced to penury and hopelessness — could not account for the political struggle — the project.

Writing should be crisp, not for itself — because there is a new aestheticization of writing, a kind of writing for its own sake. I have many friends who say that V. S. Naipaul — forget his politics — is a great writer. I’m not keen on this kind of attitude.

Writing is a form of communication. The point of writing is to reach someone, to say something. What you say is relevant, of course. But I don’t want to get dogmatic. I like to read people I might not agree with, certainly, and I can judge them by the basis of their ability to tell me what they think. This is not clarity, but precision. Is the writing precise? Why should writing be spare or precise? Because it must be able to evoke something in a reader. The reader should not have to run for cover because the author has fired off clichés — a fusillade of dead words. Writers must pay special attention to evoking something in the reader. Even texts on development should attempt to reach the heart of the readers — not to manipulate them, but to interest them.

I think socialist writing has an important and very difficult challenge. One of the things that has become clear to me is that once human beings surrender to the present, the idea of the future wears thin. There is only a present. The present stretches on into infinity. When we say tomorrow, we mean only tomorrow in time, but not in epochal terms. Tomorrow will look like today. The sensation of an endless present greets us each day. Change is never going to come.

That feeling — of futility — is the greatest detriment to the socialist imagination. Socialist writing, to my mind, has to help break that fatalism and create what Arundhati Roy calls “a new imagination” — an imagination of a different kind of world, with different priorities and different sensibilities.

[...]

But more than anything else, the socialist should not write in a register of anguish or even merely anger. For gloom and doom does not help clarify the future, the possibility of the future.

I’ve been saying that the time of the present is over, and that the time of the future is at hand. What this means is not that we are on the threshold of a breakthrough, but that the managers of our world order are not capable of solving our problems. That means that the present has no solutions for us. We need to seek our solutions from the future, from a different way of ordering our needs and our luxuries, our excesses and our scarcities.

We don’t need texts of frustration and rage, but texts that suggest inevitability, the idea that we have in our marrow that this present of ours is simply not able to deal with our problems of inequality, climate catastrophes, war and so on, and that we not only need an alternative but that in our struggles an alternative is at hand. In other words, the time of the future exists in our struggles. Our writing has to capture that sensation.

Narrative writing sets down details in an order that evokes the writer's experience for the reader, she announced. This seemed obvious but also radical - no one had ever said it so plainly to us. She spoke often of "the job." If you're doing your job, the reader feels what you felt. You don't have to tell the reader how to feel. No one likes to be told how to feel about something. [...]

We were to avoid emotional language. The line goes gray when you do that, she said. Don't tell the reader that someone was happy or sad. When you do that, the reader has nothing to see. She isn't angry, Annie said. She throws his clothes out the window. Be specific.

E. L. Doctorow once said that "writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way." You don’t have to see where you’re going, you don’t have to see your destination or everything you will pass along the way. You just have to see two or three feet ahead of you. This is right up there with the best advice about writing, or life, I have ever heard.

You are going to love some of your characters, because they are you or some facet of you, and you are going to hate some of your characters for the same reason. But no matter what, you are probably going to have to let bad things happen to some of the characters you love or you won’t have much of a story. Bad things happen to good characters, because our actions have consequences, and we do not all behave perfectly all the time. As soon as you start protecting your characters from the ramifications of their less-than-lofty behavior, your story will start to feel flat and pointless, just like in real life. Get to know your characters as well as you can, let there be something at stake, and then let the chips fall where they may. [...]

Lastly: I heard Alice Adams give a lecture on the short story once, one aspect of which made the writing students in her audience so excited that I have passed it along to my students ever since. (Most of the time I give her credit.) She said that sometimes she uses a formula when writing a short story, which goes ABDCE, for Action, Background, Development, Climax, and Ending. You begin with action that is compelling enough to draw us in, make us want to know more. Background is where you let us see and know who these people are, how they’ve come to be together, what was going on before the opening of the story. Then you develop these people, so that we learn what they care most about. The plot—the drama, the actions, the tension—will grow out of that. You move them along until everything comes together in the climax, after which things are different for for the main characters, different in some real way. And then there is the ending: what is our sense of who these people are now, what are they left with, what happened, and what did it mean?

I honestly think in order to be a writer, you have to learn to be reverent. If not, why are you writing? Why are you here?

Let’s think of reverence as awe, as presence in and openness to the world. The alternative is that we stultify, we shut down. Think of those times when you’ve read prose or poetry that is presented in such a way that you have a fleeting sense of being startled by beauty or insight, by a glimpse into someone’s soul. All of a sudden everything seems to fit together or at least to have some meaning for a moment. This is our goal as writers, I think; to help others have this sense of—please forgive me—wonder, of seeing things anew, things that can catch us off guard, that break in on our small, bordered worlds. When this happens, everything feels more spacious. [...]

Annie Dillard has said that day by day you have to give the work before you all the best stuff you have, not saving up for later projects. If you give freely, there will always be more. This is a radical proposition that runs so contrary to human nature, or at least to my nature, that I personally keep trying to find loopholes in it. But it is only when I go ahead and decide to shoot my literary, creative wad on a daily basis that I get any sense of full presence [...]

Two things put me in the spirit to give. One is that I have come to think of almost everyone with whom I come into contact as a patient in the emergency room. I see a lot of gaping wounds and dazed expressions. Or, as Marianne Moore put it, "The world’s an orphan’s home." And this feels more true than almost anything else I know. But so many of us can be soothed by writing: think of how many times you have opened a book, read one line, and said, "Yes!" And I want to give people that feeling, too, of connection, communion.

The other is to think of the writers who have given a book to me, and then to write a book back to them. This gift they have given us, which we pass on to those around us, was fashioned out of their lives. You wouldn’t be a writer if reading hadn’t enriched your soul more than other pursuits. So write a book back to V. S. Naipaul or Margaret Atwood or Wendell Berry or whoever it is who most made you want to write, whose work you most love to read. Make it as good as you can. It is one of the greatest feelings known to humans, the feeling of being the host, of hosting people, of being the person to whom they come for food and drink and company. This is what the writer has to offer.

All that I know about the relationship between publication and mental health was summed up in one line of the movie Cool Runnings, which is about the first Jamaican bobsled team. The coach is a four-hundred-pound man who had won a gold in Olympic bobsledding twenty years before but has been a complete loser ever since. The men on his team are desperate to win an Olympic medal, just as half the people in my classes are desperate to get published. But the coach says, "If you’re not enough before the gold medal, you won’t be enough with it." You may want to tape this to the wall near your desk.

Style is a very simple matter; it is all rhythm. Once you get that, you can't use the wrong words. But on the other hand here am I sitting after half the morning, crammed with ideas, and visions, and so on, and can't dislodge them, for lack of the right rhythm. Now this is very profound, what rhythm is, and goes far deeper than words. A sight, an emotion, creates this wave in the mind, long before it makes words to fit it.

All right, so you shut the door, and you write down a first draft, at white heat, because that energy has been growing in you all through the prewriting stage and when released at last, is incandescent. You trust yourself and the story and you write.

[...]

Then it cools down and you cool down, and arrive, probably somewhat chilled and rueful, at the next stage. Your story is full of ugly, stupid bits. You distrust it now, and that's as it should be. But you still have to trust yourself. You have to know that you can make it better. Unless you're a genius or have extremely low standards, composition is followed by critical, patient revision, with the thinking mind turned on.

I can trust myself to write my story at white heat without asking any questions of it - if I know my craft through practice - if I have at least a sense of where this story's going - and if when it's got there, I'm willing to turn right round and go over it and over it, word by word, idea by idea, testing and proving it till it goes right. Till all of it goes right.

Consider the story as a dance, the reader and writer as partners. The writer leads, yes; but leading isn't pushing; it's setting up a field of mutuality where two people can move in cooperation with grace. It takes two to tango.

Fiction, like all art, takes place in a space that is the maker's loving difference from the thing made. Without that space there can be no consistent truthfulness and no true respect for the human beings the story is about.

Though the author may pretend otherwise, the author's point of view is larger than the character's and includes knowledge the character lacks. This means that the character, existing only in the author's knowledge, may be known as we cannot ever know any actual person; and such insight may reveal insights and durable truths relevant to our own lies.

To fuse author and character - to limit the character's behavior to what the author approves of doing, or the character's opinions to the author's opinions, and so forth - is to lose that chance of revelation.

The author's tone may be cold or passionately concerned; it may be detached or judgmental; the difference of the author's point of view from the character's may be obvious or concealed; but the difference must exist. In the space provided by that difference, discovery, change, learning, action, tragedy, fulfillment take place - the story takes place.

Some of the most praised recent memoirs have been about growing up in poverty [...] The ground of our experience is dark, and all our inventions start in that darkness. From it, some of them leap forth in fire.

The imagination can transfigure the dark matter of life. And in many personal essays and autobiographies, that's what I begin to miss, to crave: transfiguration. To recognise our shared, familiar misery is not enough. I want to recognise something I never saw before. I want the vision to leap out at me, terrible and blazing - the fire of the transfiguring imagination. I want the true dragons.

When I was young, I used to know that I had a story to write when I found in my mind and body an imaginary person whom I could embody myself in, with whom I could identify strongly, deeply, bodily. It was so much like falling in love that maybe that's what it was.

Forget how inventing stuff breaks a contract with the reader, it fences the memoirist off from the deeper truths that only surface in draft five or ten or twenty. Yes, you can misinterpret—happens all the time. “The truth ambushes you,” Geoffrey Wolff once said. (More on those hair-raising reversals in a later chapter.) But unless you’re looking at actual lived experience, the more profound meanings will remain forever shrouded. You’ll never unearth the more complex truths, the ones that counter that convenient first take on the past. A memoirist forging false tales to support his more comfortable notions—or to pump himself up for the audience—never learns who he is. He’s missing the personal liberation that comes from the examined life.

You’re seeking enough quiet to let the Real You into your mind. Inspiration—the drawing into the body of some truth-giving spirit ready to walk observantly through the doors of the past. Then, with eyes still closed, approach the memory you’re scared to set down. Start by composing the scene in carnal terms—by which I mean using sensory impressions, not sexual ones. Smell is the oldest sense—even one-celled animals without spinal cords can smell—and it cues emotional memory like nothing else. If you can conjure the aroma of where you are—fresh-cut grass or lemon furniture oil, say—you’re halfway there.

What can you see, hear, touch, taste? What do you have on? Is the cloth rough or smooth? If you’re on the beach, there’s a salt spray, and you need a sweater. In the trench, sweat snails down your spine. What taste is in your mouth?

I always liken the state I’m in before I write to waking too early to rise and looking for a wormhole to corkscrew down into that more honest place. You want a clear sense memory, a treasured (or despised) object. And most of all, you want your old body. Your cold hand wrapped around a jelly glass of grape juice. That toy monkey with the switch on its back that banged cymbals and—when smacked on its head—hissed at you. You need a point of physical and psychic connection, a memory you’d swear by to start with. Then allow the memory to play itself. It won’t be video footage, of course, only jump cuts, snippets, an idea here and there, an image.

Now open your eyes. If you’re doing this right, the whole thing should’ve been arrestingly vivid, maybe even a little awful. Many students open their eyes with tears welling up.

The secret to any voice grows from a writer’s finding a tractor beam of inner truth about psychological conflicts to shine the way. While an artist consciously constructs a voice, she chooses its elements because they’re natural expressions of character. So above all, a voice has to sound like the person wielding it—the super-most interesting version of that person ever—and grow from her core self.

Pretty much all the great memoirists I’ve met sound on the page like they do in person. If the page is a mask, you rip it off only to find that the writer’s features exactly mold to the mask’s form, with nary a gap between public and private self. These writers’ voices make you feel close to—almost inside—their owners. Who doesn’t halfway consider even a fictional narrator like Huck Finn or Scout a pal?

The voice should permit a range of emotional tones—too wiseass, and it denies pathos; too pathetic, and it’s shrill. It sets and varies distance from both the material and the reader—from cool and diffident to high-strung and close. The writer doesn’t choose these styles so much as he’s born to them, based on who he is and how he experienced the past.

Voice isn’t just a manner of talking. It’s an operative mindset and way of perceiving that naturally stems from feeling oneself alive inside the past. That’s why self-awareness is so key. The writer who’s lived a fairly unexamined life—someone who has a hard time reconsidering a conflict from another point of view—may not excel at fashioning a voice because her defensiveness stands between her and what she has to say. Also, we naturally tend to superimpose our present selves onto who we were before, and that can prevent us from recalling stuff that doesn’t shore up our current identities. Or it can warp understanding to fit more comfortable interpretations. All those places we misshape the past have to be ’fessed to, and such reflections and uncertainties have to find expression in voice.

This talent for truth includes a voice’s bold ability to render events we find unbelievable elsewhere. On the first page of Hilary Mantel’s Giving Up the Ghost—for my money a book as worship-worthy as any of her prizewinning fiction—we hear about her encounters with the spirit world. On a staircase, she passes through a shimmer in the air that contains a ghost: “I know it is my stepfather’s ghost coming down. Or, to put it in a way acceptable to most people, I ‘know’ it is my stepfather’s ghost.” First off, she states the mystical experience as simple fact, but because she knows many readers in our skeptical culture will adjudge her bonkers, she spends a subsequent sentence traveling to where those readers’ more rationalist belief systems hold sway. She rephrases, putting know in quotes. So she starts inside her mystical experience, then briefly jogs to where the dubious reader stands prepared to discount her. And from that instant, we trust this most sensible of voices to incorporate both the irrational and our doubt about it. In doing so, she’s invited us into the supernatural experiences so common to her. She speculates a few paragraphs later about the auras of eye migraines that torment her—allowing neurological possibilities for her ghost-related experiences. Above all, we’re convinced of her firm curiosity about her encounters with the supernatural, her willingness to explore any explanation for them.

Carnality may determine whether a memoir’s any good, but interiority—that kingdom the camera never captures—makes a book rereadable. By rereadable, translate: great. Your connection to most authors usually rests (Nabokov and a few others aside) in how you may identify with them. Mainly, the better memoirist organizes a life story around that aforementioned inner enemy—a psychic struggle against herself that works like a thread or plot engine.

Interiority moves us through the magic realms of time and truth, hope and fantasy, memory, feelings, ideas, worries. Emotions you can’t show carnally are told. Whenever a writer gets reflective about how she feels or complains or celebrates or plots or judges, she moves inside herself to where things matter and mean.

Early on in a childhood tale, an author may render consciousness awakening—that enduring, often-trivial first memory, through which a narrator blinks into being. Nabokov made such a moment so singular, its machinery almost speaks to or sparks my own such arrival, as if he described something I, too, had felt but never been able to articulate: “I see the awakening of consciousness as a series of spaced flashes, with the intervals between them gradually diminishing until bright blocks of perception are formed, affording memory a slippery hold.” As you watch the narrator feel around the edges of consciousness for its “slippery hold”—probing for what really went down—you enter a singular set of psychic perceptions. But craving that “hold” or permanence in what’s past is Nabokov’s inner enemy.

Even a writer with gargantuan external enemies must face off with himself over a book’s course. Otherwise, why write in first person at all?

The split self or inner conflict must manifest on the first pages and form the book’s thrust or through line—some journey toward the self’s overhaul by book’s end. However random or episodic a book seems, a blazing psychic struggle holds it together, either thematically or in the way a plot would keep a novel rolling forward. Often the inner enemy dovetails with the writer’s own emotional investment in the work at hand. Why is she driven to tell the tale? Usually it’s to go back and recover some lost aspect of the past so it can be integrated into current identity.

The most skillful writers either package facts so they hold this kind of psychological interest, or the data get palmed off in carnal scenes the reader can imagine and engage with on a physical level. In these books, you often don’t notice you’re being fed a string of facts. They’re sprinkled into other writing like pepper—there when you need them, but otherwise invisible.

My own first drafts start with information, then I try to herd that information out of my head into a remembered or living scene. I often interview myself about how I came to an opinion. Then, rather than present an abstract judgment (“She was a thief”), I try to re-create how I came to that opinion. “She was a thief” becomes “I stared into the computer’s big green eye, inside which sat the web site where my diamond bracelet was being sold, Lydia’s email contact in the corner.”

Some data, you may think you need to blurt out—the year, for instance. But saying, “On the news that summer, I watched the president resign before helicopters on the White House lawn” says “Nixon administration” to the reader in a slightly more fetching way. One cheap way writers try to strap on character is with T-shirt slogans and brand-name clothing. I encourage my students to work a little harder than this. Try to find something singular and dramatic a person does, instead of just gluing on a label that limits meaning to present-day fashion and won’t make sense fifty years hence.

Take data about a speaker’s age and size. “Standing under the orange hoop, I was the only freshman who could lift one ape-long arm and brush net.” This says age and size and basketball prowess while being evocative. “I tried to hunch inside the new letter jacket, but my bony wrists stuck out.” This adds an element of psychology—self-consciousness.

Most memoirs fail because of voice. It’s not distinct enough to sound alive and compelling. Or there are staunch limits to emotional tone, so it emits a single register. Being too cool or too shrill can ruin the read. The sentences are boring and predictable, or it’s so inconsistent you don’t know who’s speaking or what place they come from. You don’t believe or trust the voice. You’re not curious about the inner or outer lives of the writer. The author’s dead in the water.

We live in the age of the image, and it’s too easy to learn carnal writing for a memoirist to sketch a foggy physical world sans evocative sensory detail. A lot of instruction manuals beam in on the physical, simply because you can master it. But few textbooks take up how the inner life manifests itself in a memoir’s pages. In the more spectacular visual media like action films, say, the inner life fails to get much airplay—at most a scene in a shrink’s office or a snippet of voiceover here and there. But memoir can compete against the pyrotechnics of visual imagery in film and TV only by excelling where those media fail: writing a deeper moment from inside it.

You’re looking for that inner enemy that’ll help you to structure the book. I always have inklings of it, but tend to find it by writing interior frets and confessions and yearnings as I recall them. Maybe it’s only manifest after a first draft. Once I’ve found it, I’ll revise with it as the spine—how the self evolves to reconcile its inner conflicts over time. Your attendant setbacks and jackpots should lead up to a transformed self at the end.

So right off, he readies us for voices weaving together and for radical shifts in tone from light to dark. As a writer you can’t just start jamming stuff together, hoping the reader will magically know what’s in your mind. You have to start out slowly, by laying transitions—like leaving breadcrumbs for the reader. Then the transitions get quicker through the book. As you get used to the method, the breadcrumbs grow fewer and eventually vanish. By the end, it’s all sped-up jump cuts with invisible connections the reader’s already mastered.

[...] I kept on pushing at my own limitations and at the limits of science fiction. That is what the practice of an art is, you keep looking for the outside edge. When you find it you make a whole, solid, real, and beautiful thing; anything less is incomplete. [...]

[...] Nothing is more personal, more unshareable, than pain; the worst thing about suffering is that you suffer alone. Yet those who have not suffered, or will not admit that they suffer, are those who are cut off in cold isolation from their fellow men. Pain, the loneliest experience, gives rise to sympathy, to love: the bridge between self and other, the means of communion. So with art. The artist who goes into himself most deeply - and it is a painful journey - is the artist who touches us most closely, speaks to us most clearly.

[...] It's one thing to sacrifice fulfilment in the service of an ideal; it's another to suppress clear thinking and honest feeling in the service of an ideology. An ideology is valuable only insofar as it is used to intensify clarity and honesty of thought and feeling.

I suppose these stories are the equivalent of newspaper cartoons. They call for a quick, cynical laugh. Chekhov got very adept at writing them, and he must have learned a lot about condensing his material, since some of the papers paid more for short effective pieces than for longer ones. Later he was always advising young writers to cross out, even Maxim Gorky, and especially—here is a bit of Chekhov’s letter to Gorky—“to cross out as many adjectives and adverbs as you can. You have so many modifiers that the reader has trouble understanding and gets worn out. It is comprehensible when I write: ‘The man sat on the grass,’ because it is clear and does not detain one’s attention. On the other hand, it is difficult to figure out and hard on the brain if I write: ‘The tall, narrow-chested man of medium height and with a red beard sat down on the green grass that had already been trampled down by the pedestrians, sat down silently, looking around timidly and fearfully.’ The brain can’t grasp all of that at once, and art must be grasped at once, instantaneously.” His favorite sentence in the Russian language, he said, was one written by a classmate of his in grammar school. It went: “The sea is large.”

One of the writers remarks that the best advice he ever got about character development was to ask oneself: What is the lie this character harbors about himself? “All of us have a lie that we hinge our entire lives on,” he says.

[...]

There is a long moment of silence, and then the woman who has been diagnosed with cancer speaks. “You probably know what it is, though,” she says to the other woman. Then she gestures broadly, including the entire table. “All of us probably know, implicitly, what our lie is. Just think about it.”

I worry, once again, that my oblique approach has managed only to muddle things. I suppose I’ve been trying to suggest that subtlety is always a sign of mystery, and that our attitude toward the former is roughly commensurate with our tolerance for the latter. I have come to regard it as something of a dark art, a force of nature that can be summoned but never fully harnessed, and can backfire at the slightest misstep. Anyone can pick up a bullhorn and make her intent clear to all, but to attempt something subtle is to step blindfolded into the unknown. You are always teetering on the brink of insanity. You are always working on a wire strung across an abyss, hoping to make it from one end to the other without losing your balance, or your mind.

Perhaps this is another way of saying that subtlety is a transaction of faith. The artist must have faith that her effects will be perceived in the way she intends; the reader must trust that what he detects, beneath the surface of the text, is not merely a figment of his imagination. The disciple must come to believe that the whispers he hears in the wilderness are not the wind, or the devil, but the voice of his Creator. All religion, all forms of love, depend on this leap.

Art isn’t something you should protect from yourself. Just run towards it full sprint and embrace how ridiculous your ideas are, how unguarded, how close to something a child might think up, lying on their back in a field overgrown with weeds. The sights and sounds of the rotating world revealing itself to you, or not.

Take a sip of black gas station quality coffee, take a bite of fish sandwich, write down the adventures of the day. Every day adds up. Every lunch break is something more than a lunch break.

Having nothing to write isn’t writer’s block. It’s just the dormant phase of the work. I used to write all through this phase, and it looked like productivity. It wasn’t.

The concept of writer’s block depends on the assumption that whatever you’re producing, it’s not enough.

I need to insulate myself from even the idea of productivity in order to get anything of value done. But even the idea of getting it done is evidence of the pollution of the act.

The work I’ve done in translation, or writing essays, for example, is just labor. You get in and you do it, though the getting in can be prolonged agony. With poems, if I have a deadline—like I told my editor, Dan Halpern, that I’m going to get a book ready, so I know he needs a finished manuscript by a certain time—then I can get down to work in a forced march and say, Okay, I’m going to spend x number of hours a day and wrestle with these things and muscle through all my hesitations and get the poems into shape. There’s a part of me that wants to let problems go for a while, let a piece of writing simmer and percolate, in the hope that my unconscious will take care of it. That the solution will come. And I think that’s useful up to a point, but I also think you come back to the basic thing about writing. You’ve got to exercise your will and get work done. You’ve got to show the muse you’re willing to show up, whether anything is happening or not. But in another way I’ve been such a bad model, as far as work ethic, because of my ox-like tendencies. A lot of that labor went into prose and translation. Sometimes I would be in the middle of writing an essay on Ernesto Cardenal or on what’s going on in Chinese poetry, but I’d be thinking, Why don’t I just shut up and try to write a poem?

[...] The phrase “try harder” first came to my attention when I was writing an essay for this very magazine. Next to a paragraph that was foundering on the rocks of my typically confused mind, Mark Greif, rather than engaging in any substantial way with the content of that paragraph or giving me any guidance at all about how I might improve it, instead wrote in the margin next to the paragraph in blue ink, try harder.

At first I was puzzled. Try harder at what? Try harder at making sense, I supposed, but how? Maybe Mr. Greif should try harder at editing, I thought. But then, because he had asked, I decided to attempt what he’d suggested. I turned my attention more vigorously to the problem paragraph, and found the place in the mind where you can — motivated by heightened belief and desire — make yourself make more sense, and I sat still and worked until the paragraph got better, and it did. And the fact that he hadn’t told me what to do, but assumed that if I tried harder, I would figure out what to do, was the condition of possibility for being able to do this.

I tell the kids that the most important thing in screenwriting is to have a character that wants something. And I tell them this is harder than it sounds. The amateur tendency is to write characters that sit around on couches, talking to other characters on couches. Everyone loves writing dialogue because you can fill up the page so fast, the rising black like smoke signals in the middle of a whiteout blizzard. I love it too, I admit, but at a certain point, you have to get your protag (as I call it, horribly) off the couch and have them do something, something motivated by their desires. It sounds like the easiest thing in the world, but it’s one of the hardest, like most things that sound like the easiest thing in the world: falling in love, staying in love, not ODing at your husband’s parents’ fiftieth anniversary party.

On the whiteboard, I diagram plot arcs loosely cribbed from Save the Cat and Story. I tell them each scene needs to have a positive and negative charge – that, in other words, something has to change. I tell them that this is true of scenes, and true of sequences as well, a progression of linked scenes. Sequences have to change, and so do acts, which sequences build, and so do screenplays, which are made of three to five acts, depending. I tell them that story is really about change, from the macro to micro level, and that, in this sense, a screenplay is like one of those images made from smaller constituent images of the same thing: a face, for example, but when you get closer you see the features are made of the same face, and closer still, that elements of the features – the shadow of a nostril, for example – is made of very small faces, and when you press your eyeballs up to those faces, you see a pixelated constellation of a thousand more faces. I tell them there’s a word for this that has escaped me and that I’ll give extra credit to anyone who tracks it down, which is ridiculous, as this is a talented and gifted summer camp, and there are no grades.

Here, Chekhov gives us an opportunity to reconsider the scary term “structure.”

We might think of structure as simply: an organizational scheme that allows the story to answer a question it has caused its reader to ask.

Me, at the end of the first page: “Poor Marya. I already sort of care about her. How did she get here?”

Story, in the first paragraph of its second page: “Well, she had some bad luck.”

We might imagine structure as a form of call-and-response. A question arises organically from the story and then the story, very considerately, answers it. If we want to make good structure, we just have to be aware of what question we are causing the reader to ask, then answer that question.

There should be a name for this moment in a story when, a situation having been established, a new character arrives. We automatically expect that new element to alter or complicate or deepen the situation. A man stands in an elevator, muttering under his breath about how much he hates his job. The door opens, someone gets in. Don’t we automatically understand that this new person has appeared to alter or complicate or deepen the first man’s hatred of his job? (Otherwise, what’s he doing here? Get rid of him and find us someone who will alter, complicate, or deepen things. It’s a story, after all, not a webcam.)

Having understood Marya as “she who is unhappy with the monotony of her life,” we’re already waiting for some altering presence to arrive.

And here comes Hanov.

This is the big event of the page, and notice this: having made Marya on its first page, the story didn’t stay static for long at all. (We didn’t get a second page merely explicating her boredom.) This should tell us something about the pace of a story versus the pace of real life: the story is way faster, compressed, and exaggerated—a place where something new always has to be happening, something relevant to that which has already happened.

GURGANUS

Remember, it was the Summer of Love, and here I was, nineteen, sexually able but with my head shaved and at sea for weeks on end. The best of what I’d done so far and might do just ahead could only be described one blank page at a time. Drawing and writing soon started feeling interchangeable. I could now draw mug shots of my characters, I could write my still lifes. In sketchbooks, I paid studious homage to minds and skills far, far beyond my own. It felt like a religious practice but one freed of tithing to any single God.

INTERVIEWER

You needed to make things.

GURGANUS

I made something every day. Early on, I sensed that—in every art—the ultimate shared subject is human consciousness itself. The more comic-tragic notes you can wrest onto a single active page, the better. I would later suggest to my students that they put something funny on every page and something beautiful on every other. My naive obsession was to shape something so true, energized, and hilarious, it would necessarily outlive me. The goal was not becoming known, it was becoming useful.

INTERVIEWER

You were conscious of a literary immortality even then?

GURGANUS

Plot confuses beginning storytellers by sounding so extruded, mechanical. Simply put, plot is what your characters most want and whatever they will do to get it. I am always attracted to characters having a hard time. Fiction can be summarized as “and then something went terribly, terribly wrong.” The more specific the hero’s trouble, the more unconventional his wish or obsession, the greater chance the story has of saying something new and helpful. Empathy is a writer’s pilot’s license. Without it, you are grounded. You aren’t creating characters. You’re judging them.

INTERVIEWER

Let’s talk for a second about that sexual candor in your work. How have you arrived at such intrepid portrayals?

GURGANUS

Long research, sleepless nights. I want to offer my characters some sexual risk taking, a reflection of the way I once lived my life. I’ve learned so much about others, in and out of bed. Tennessee Williams swore he’d never created a character to whom he was not sexually attracted. I always urged my students to let their characters have erotic existences on the page. We put the poor things through such tortures, why not let them score a few Fridays and Saturdays per annum? What a protagonist eats and wears and how he decorates his rooms and treats his parents—yeah, all that’s important. But what she wants sexually and what she’ll risk to get some of it on a given weekend—that’s a fast, amazing way to show her true hidden identity. I’m pleased to see young novelists now risking far more sexual honesty. What subject is more mystical and entertaining? Most sexual exchanges are far more awkward, and therefore more endearing, than what you find online. Ordinary folks’ groping attempts I usually find far sexier than a couple of tanned models going at it in Malibu. A writer, a real writer, must be fully committed to those people somehow created on his pages. He cannot stand apart from them, cannot cartoon or disdain them. They are not quite villains, they are hardly saints. They are all citizens different from each other, each with a peculiar mission, varying sets of merits and flaws. They are partial talents striving toward something, but what? For sure, it’s a fascinating exercise, creating others and then trying to be responsible both for and to them.

I like to be up by six thirty. I guess I do this as proof to my father—dead for decades—that writing is really manly labor. He himself was an early riser. Like him I prefer those hours when dew is everywhere and birds are first auditioning their day’s likely song. I’m sure that if God created Eden he did it all with a single dawn. Early-hour innocence promotes ambitious, unrealistic hopes. You’ve just been dreaming. You have strong coffee and a piece of fruit. You reread what you got down yesterday. It’s important to leave yourself a handhold on the cliff you are inventing. Most days involve rewriting, boiling out the cornstarch, essentializing a gesture, paring down dialogue that’s grown too wordy or explicit. On schedule you go through familiar rituals that’ve at least produced satisfying results. Most days such work can go on till two or three. Then you get to do your banking or shopping or gardening. You again become a citizen of the sloppy capitalist realm after shoring up the secret world you’ve been home inventing in black and white.

When writing first drafts, the only music audible should be your own language and pulse—the metronomic drumbeat of your personal digestive percussion section. But, later, when I’m typing in handwritten changes, what sometimes speeds my fingers and cheers me is listening to solo keyboard work—played by Oscar Peterson or Glenn Gould, Monk, or Gershwin’s piano rolls. Reading the work aloud is another trade secret that can’t be stressed too often. Every sentence must make logical sense while offering its appropriate ghost song. Even someone reading your work silently should be always registering its music. I prefer chamber works. I love four instruments in conversation, arguing before briefly agreeing. That’s closer to the spirit of my work. Bach, Mozart, and Brahms are some of my friends I daily hear and learn the most from.

It’s important, I think, to see the whole MFA thing as a pretty freaky but short-term immersion. You are not going to be doing this workshop crap forever. You are doing it to get a little baptism by fire, purge yourself of certain habits (of sloth, of under-revision, of the sin of thinking you’ve made a thing clear when you haven’t) and then you are going to run away from the whole approach like your pants are on fire, and not look back, but return to that sacred land where your writing is private and you don’t have to defend or explain it one bit. If you need that immersion and think it would help, go for it. If not, not. And don’t apply just because you think it’s the thing to do or is a “good career move” or everyone else in your school is doing it. Apply when you really feel you need … something: shelter or focus or good readers or just some time out of the capitalist shitstorm.

The thing to lament is not only that we have a bunch of novels about harpoons and dinghies (or suburbs or bad marriages or road trips or offices in New York). The thing to lament is also the dead end of isolation that comes from describing the dead end of isolation—and from using vibrant literary communities to foster this phenomenon. In our workshops, we simply accept it as true that larger structures of common interest have been destroyed by the atomizing forces of economy and ideology, and what’s left to do is be faithful to the needs of the sentence.

To have read enough to feel the oceanic movement of events and ideas in history; to have experienced enough to escape the confines of a personal provincialism; to have distanced yourself enough from your hang-ups and pettiness to create words reflecting the emotional complexity of minds beyond your own; to have worked with language long enough to be able to wield it beautifully; and to have genius enough to find dramatic situations that embody all that you have lived and read, is rare. It’s not something that every student of creative writing—in the hundreds of programs up and running these days—is going to pull off. Maybe one person a decade will pull it off. Maybe one person every half century will really pull it off.

My first workshop with her was a revelation. I’d put up my application story—most of us did at some point—with the idea that it was the best I had. She saw straight through it, the way it was a mix of the autobiographical (I really had been in a coven in high school, with my high school boyfriend) and the fantastical (I did not ever help the police find lost children with clairvoyant dreams). I had tried, crudely, to make something out of a Dungeons & Dragons group I’d been in back in high school, but I hadn’t done the work of inventing a narrator who was whole and independent of me. Deborah drew lines around what was invented, and what was not, with a delicate pencil, and patiently explained to me how what we invent, we control, and how what we don’t, we don’t—and that it shows. That what we borrow from life tends to be the most problematic, and that the problem stems from the way we’ve already invented so much of what we think we know about ourselves, without admitting it.

[...] workshops: you meet people there you’d never meet otherwise, much less show your work to, and you listen to them talk about your story or your novel. These are not your ideal readers—they are the readers you happen to have. Listening to their critiques forces you past the limits of your imagination and also your sympathies, and in doing so takes you past the limits of what you can reach for in your work on your own. A fiction writer’s work is limited by his sense of reality, and workshop after workshop blows that open by injecting the fact of other people’s realities.

We moved to my next profound question: What do you know that no one else knows? My premise was that good writing depends on a kind of specialized knowledge—whether of some process, or some relationship, or some situation or event. If people would just tell us what actually happened! We would know so much; we would learn so much. Of Kafka’s commitment to telling the whole truth about himself and his life, Elias Canetti wrote: “A human being who offers himself to knowledge so completely is, under any circumstances, an incomparable stroke of luck.” We do not have to be Kafka—but we can at least tell one truth, or two, about our lives. As the editor of a literary magazine, I had read so many “stories”—fiction or nonfiction, it didn’t matter. They were made-up, and the more made-up they were, the more conventional. Where truth was left out or kept general, cliché filled the void. The mistake made over and over was to search for the “universal,” when (this is itself a cliché, maybe, but still) it was the specific stuff that readers wanted to know. But of course it’s not so easy to figure out what the specific stuff is. One’s life contains so many things; how are you to know which of these things is distinctive?

Sanity in a writer is merely this: However stupid he may be in his private life, he never cheats in writing. He never forgets that his audience is, at least ideally, as noble, generous, and tolerant as he is himself (or more so), and never forgets that he is writing about people, so that to turn characters to cartoons, to treat his characters as innately inferior to himself, to forget their reasons for being as they are, to treat them as brutes, is bad art. Sanity in a writer also involves taste. The true writer has a great advantage over most other people: He knows the great tradition of literature, which has always been the cutting edge of morality, religion, and politics, to say nothing of social reform. He knows what the greatest literary minds of the past are proud to do and what they will not stoop to, and his knowledge informs his practice. He fits himself to the company he most respects and enjoys: the company of Homer, Vergil, Dante, Shakespeare, and so forth. Their standards become, in some measure, his own. Pettiness, vulgarity, bad taste fall away from him automatically, and when he reads bad writers he notices their lapses of taste at once. He sees that they dwell on things Shakespeare would not have dwelled on, at his best, not because Shakespeare failed to notice them but because he saw their triviality. (Except to examine new techniques, or because of personal friendship, no serious apprentice should ever study second-rate writers.)

To write with taste, in the highest sense, is to write with the assumption that one out of a hundred people who read one’s work may be dying, or have some loved one dying; to write so that no one commits suicide, no one despairs; to write, as Shakespeare wrote, so that people understand, sympathize, see the universality of pain, and feel strengthened, if not directly encouraged to live on. This is not to say, of course, that the writer who has no personal experience of pain and terror should try to write about pain and terror, or that one should never write lightly, humorously; it is only to say that every writer should be aware that he might be read by the desperate, by people who might be persuaded toward life or death. It does not mean, either, that writers should write moralistically, like preachers. And above all it does not mean that writers should lie. It means only that they should think, always, of what harm they might inadvertently do and not do it. If there is good to be said, the writer should remember to say it. If there is bad to be said, he should say it in a way that reflects the truth that, though we see the evil, we choose to continue among the living. The true artist is never so lost in his imaginary world that he forgets the real world, where teen-agers have a chemical propensity toward anguish, people between their thirties and forties have a tendency to get divorced, and people in their seventies have a tendency toward loneliness, poverty, self-pity, and sometimes anger. The true artist chooses never to be a bad physician. He gets his sense of worth and honor from his conviction that art is powerful—even bad art.

What is now being celebrated, we’re told, is the system’s newfound commitment to greater inclusiveness. But there is a sharp distinction to be made between celebrating the appearance of new talent in filmmaking and celebrating the continued box office success of the blockbuster form itself. For moviegoers it is not always so easy to tell the difference, but every film executive understands it.

Criticism’s function is separate from that. “All that is required of the embattled critic as a test of his courage is that he never lose faith in his own judgment,” the film critic Andrew Sarris wrote in 1970. That kind of critical courage has waned in the age of the blockbuster. Jonathan Rosenbaum’s retirement from the Chicago Reader in 2008 left a vacuum in critical conscience that was filled by a strange, renewed interest in the opinions of the top critics at major media outlets, even as their opinions became more wishy-washy and noncommittal. No critic wants to get owned by Samuel L. Jackson on Twitter, like one did when the Avengers movie before last came out. It’s easier and safer for critics to embrace the style of feeble criticism that has emerged alongside the blockbusters they would prefer to avoid. For all the anger at critics, film criticism is very gentle these days.

THIS COLLECTION OPENS in 1941, when Patricia Highsmith introduces the first of her diaries—Diary 1a—to be kept in tandem with her notebooks. On April 14, 1941, she writes, “Je suis fait[e] de deux appétits: l’amour et la pensée [My appetite is twofold: I hunger for love and for thought].” How much experience is needed, she wonders, in order to write about it? To what extent does one side of this equation feed off the other? [...]

3/5/41

It has become a platitude that an artist’s life should be hard, should be blood and sweat, tears and disappointment, struggle and exhaustion. This fight, I believe, should be in his attitude towards the world: his difficulty lies always in keeping himself apart, intellectually and creatively, maintaining his own identity at the same time he identifies himself with society. But in his own work, there should be none of this pain. He creates a thing because he has mastered it and is familiar with it. He produces it easily, having once taken his idea in his bosom. A great struggle in composition is apparent in his work, and shows it to be an artificial, foreign, and most of all, a feeble and unsure thing. Great work has come easily: I do not mean fluently, but easily, from this sense of mastery, and has been later if necessary polished and changed at leisure, and cheerfully.

10/7/43

How delicate is the scale in which an artist weighs his worth. It must be delicate. There must be no overconfidence in the sustaining of his creative period: there must be confidence only in his honesty, and in nothing else. The reprimand of some slight fault, the polishing of a piece of work, in an evening, instead of the satisfying act of creation, is easily enough to destroy all that gives him joy, courage, pleasure and reward. A wastebasket out of place can do it. A cut in the finger can do it. And only the making of new life can reconstruct the shambles.

10/16/43

Every artist possesses a core—and this core remains forever untouched. Untouched by the lover and the beloved. However much you may love a woman, she can never enter.

11/24/44

Perils of a first novel: Every character is one’s self, resulting in an oversoft or overhard treatment, neither of which results in the objective, which is essentially what has made good so much of the writing one has done before.

7/1/45

For future reference: In case of doldrums of mind or body or both, sterility, depression, inertia, frustration, or the overwhelming sense of time passing and time past, read true detective stories, take suburban train rides, stand a while in Grand Central—do anything that may give a sweeping view of individuals’ lives, the ceaseless activity, the daedal ramifications, the incredible knots of circumstance, the twists and turns in all their lives, which no writer is gifted enough to conceive, sitting in the closeness of his quiet room.

1/31/47

A writer should not think himself a different kind of person from any other, since this is the way to the promontory. He has developed a certain part of himself which is contained in every man: the seeing, the setting down. Only in the realization of this humble and heroic fact can he become what he must be, a medium, a pane of glass between God on the one side and man on the other.

9/3/47

Advice to a young writer: approach the typewriter with respect and formality. (Is my hair combed? My lipstick on straight? Above all are my cuffs clean and properly shot?) The typewriter is quick to detect any nuance of irreverence and can retaliate in kind, in double measure, and effortlessly. The typewriter is above all alert, sensitive as you are, far more efficient in its tasks. After all, it slept better than you did last night, and just a little longer.

5/7/50

It is freedom, which muddles a man up. I am not advocating totalitarianism. But a writer must learn how to impose his own totalitarianisms upon himself, himself being sole governor, knowing that he is free to change discipline and routine after due process of altering within himself his legislation.

9/29/57

On concentrating. (For The Writer possibly). A small matter, concentrating. But how many young writers can do it? It is not a new typewriter, a cushion in the chair, even necessarily stimulating or tranquilizing music playing. For most people, it is a guarantee of privacy. One cannot tell someone how to write a novel, the ingredients. One can only tell if they are not there. Privacy. An expensive thing in the modern world. How many young writers give themselves a chance? It is considered eccentric to like to be alone. Yet for such a short time, either a stay at a country cottage, or absolute quiet for six hours a day produce far more than the trouble costs. Take yourself seriously. Set a routine. Once you are alone, relax and behave as you will. Stand still for a moment and relish the novel sensation of knowing that you are utterly alone and will not be disturbed by a ringing telephone, a baby’s cry, an order from a boss, a groan or a whine from a spouse. Privacy is expensive. Perhaps it costs somebody else something. Relish it. But don’t feel guilty about having it. Take it as your due. Indulge yourself in everything that can possibly contribute to your writing. For instance, in the height of composition, which may last a week, a month, three months, you may not feel like writing personal letters. Don’t write them. Personal letters take something out of you, something of creative energy. It may be also that you cannot read other people’s fiction, however inspiring, or however much you may admire the author and wish to emulate him or her. To read a novel over a period of days means that you carry around in your head an emotionally charged atmosphere, a whole stage full of characters. While you are writing a book, you must carry around your own stage full of characters with their emotional charges. You have no room for another stage.

11/7/60

Lots of writers, especially young writers, think they will put down “everything” in one book. They mean human consciousness (that mystery!), emotions, atmosphere, the whole gamut of existence. When they begin writing their book, they realize how much must be left out, how painfully specialized a work of art has to be to be any good at all. They’ll tell only a fraction of what they want to in each book.

12/18/60

The muse doesn’t come when you beckon. She comes when you’ve tried all day to get something right, and you’re tired and about to go to bed—and then you stay up. She comes when you’ve lost your love. She touches you, she touches your shoulder, and then you know you’re not alone after all.

Why I adopted such a strategy of transfer is no longer clear to me. Displacing my personal experience off into other environments went back at least as far as "The Small Rain." Part of this was an unkind impatience with fiction I felt then to be "too autobiographical." Somewhere I had come up with the notion that one's personal life had nothing to do with fiction, when the truth, as everyone knows, is nearly the direct opposite. Moreover, contrary evidence was all around me, though I chose to ignore it, for in fact the fiction both published and unpublished that moved and pleased me then as now was precisely that which had been made luminous, undeniably authentic by having been found and taken up, always at a cost, from deeper, more shared levels of the life we all really live. I hate to think that I didn't, however defectively, understand this. Maybe the rent was just too high. In any case, stupid kid, I preferred fancy footwork instead.

Wherever he goes, he should try to think, as much as possible, about things that have absolutely nothing to do with the film. It is difficult, but it is necessary to create a barrier, a cellular wall between shooting and editing. Fred Zinnemann would go climbing in the Alps after the end of shooting, just to put himself in a potentially life-threatening situation where he had to be there, not day-dreaming about the film’s problems.

Then, after a few weeks, he would come down from the Alps, back to earth; he would sit down in a dark room, alone, the arc light would ignite, and he would watch his film. He would still be, inherently, brimming with those images from beyond the edge of the frame (a director will never be fully able to forget them), but if he had gone straight from shooting to editing, the confusion would be worse and he would have gotten the two different thought processes of shooting and editing irrevocably mixed up.

Do everything you can to help the director erect this barrier for himself so that when he first sees the film, he can say, “All right, I’m going to pretend that I had nothing to do with this film. It needs some work. What needs to be done?”

Overambitious projects may be objectionable in many fields, but not in literature. Literature remains alive only if we set ourselves immeasurable goals, far beyond all hope of achievement. Only if poets and writers set themselves tasks that no one else dares imagine will literature continue to have a function. Since science has begun to distrust general explanations and solutions that are not sectorial and specialized, the grand challenge for literature is to be capable of weaving together the various branches of knowledge, the various "codes," into a manifold and multifaceted vision of the world.

Powerful narratives do not give us static pictures of life; they are not true or accurate in any one-to-one mapping of the world. What they do, at their most imaginatively incisive, is foreground aspects of reality that go unnoticed, that are so familiar that we overlook them. More politically, they "redistribute the perceptible" as Jacques Ranciere says, bringing to light what is hidden in full view. They dislocate a sense of what is just "natural," unchangeable. In this way, they provide a dissensus, a dismantling of the consensual way of ordering how we perceive the world and how we evaluate it. [...]