writing
In my experience of writing, you generally start out with some overall idea that you can see fairly clearly, as if you were standing on a dock and looking at a ship on the ocean. At first you can see the entire ship, but then as you begin work you’re in the boiler room and you can’t see the ship anymore. All you can see are the pipes and the grease and the fittings of the boiler room and, you have to assume, the ship’s exterior. What you really want in an editor is someone who’s still on the dock, who can say, Hi, I’m looking at your ship, and it’s missing a bow, the front mast is crooked, and it looks to me as if your propellers are going to have to be fixed.
Quoted in “Robert Gottlieb, The Art of Editing No. 1,” Paris Review, Issue 132, fall 1994.
Such a small, pure object a poem could be, made of nothing but air, a tiny string of letters, maybe small enough to fit in the palm of your hand. But it could blow everybody’s head off.
Lit (New York: Harper, 2009), 59.
As a work gets more autobiographical, more intimate, more confessional, more embarrassing, it breaks into fragments. Our lives aren’t prepackaged along narrative lines and, therefore, by its very nature, reality-based art—underprocessed, underproduced—splinters and explodes.
Reality Hunger: A Manifesto (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010), 27.
I’m interested in the ways in which stories of suffering might be used to mask other, less marketable stories of suffering.
Reality Hunger: A Manifesto (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010), 42.
Analogies, it is true, decide nothing, but they can make one feel more at home.
“The Dissection of the Psychical Personality,” New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis (New York: W. W. Norton, 1965), 90.
Count yourself lucky…You’re still promising until your first book’s out.
Lit (New York: Harper, 2009), 68.
Ultimately I look upon writing as wings. We are pedestrians, we walk along the earth; we may love the earth, but the moment of absolute magic is when our imagination allows us to take flights into vaster, more entrancing worlds.
The Diary of Anaïs Nin (Vol 7, 1966–1974) (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980), 85.
I had learned already never to empty the well of my writing; but always to stop when there was still something there in the deep part of the well, and let it refill at night from the springs that fed it.
A Moveable Feast (New York: Scribner, 2009), restored edition, 58.
The place where I write, upstairs in our farmhouse, has windows facing into the woods. The walls are lined with bookshelves. To avoid distraction, I write on a computer that is not connected to the internet. (I check email elsewhere in the house.) My companions in this room are the likes of Virginia Woolf and George Eliot, who peer down at me from the shelves, and a blue fish named Bruno. They are all very quiet.
Answer to the question, “Do you write every day?” in the FAQs, http://barbarakingsolver.net.
Pounding out a first draft is like hoeing a row of corn—you just keep your head down and concentrate on getting to the end. Revision is where fine art begins. It’s thrilling to take an ending and pull it backward like a shiny thread through the whole fabric of a manuscript, letting little glints shine through here and there. To plant resolution, like a seed, into chapter one. To create new scenes, investing a character with the necessary damage, the right kind of longing. To pitch out boldly and try again. To work every metaphor across the whole, back and forth, like weaving. I love that word “fabrication,” because making an elaborate fiction feels so much like making cloth.
Answer to the question, “Do you go through a lot of drafts?” in the FAQs, http://barbarakingsolver.net.
Write early in the morning, cultivate memory, reread core books, take detailed reading notes, work on several projects at once, maintain a thick archive, rotate crops, take a weekly Sabbath, go to bed at the same time, exercise so hard you can’t think during it, talk to different kinds of people including the very young and very old, take words and their histories seriously (i.e., read dictionaries), step outside of the empire of the English language regularly, look for vocabulary from other fields, love the basic, keep your antennae tuned, and seek out contexts of understanding quickly (i.e., use guides, encyclopedias, and Wikipedia without guilt).
John Durham Peters, in a wide-ranging interview with the Los Angeles Review of Books about his new book The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media.
My characters are who they are. For years, people have written and asked me to let Margaret go through menopause. And it’s like, ‘Hey guys! Margaret is 12 and she is going to stay 12. That’s who she is.’
“At 80, Judy Blume Reflects On Feminism, #MeToo And Keeping Margaret 12,” NPR, February 12, 2018.