WoW Saturday

Both "writers on writing" and "words of wisdom" can be shortened with the same word. Thus, welcome to WoW Saturdays, June to September 2011. Enjoy this collection of writers quotes throughout the summer.

 

A hidden nerve is what every writer is ultimately about. It's what all writers wish to uncover when writing about themselves in this age of the personal memoir. And yet it's also the first thing every writer learns to sidestep, to disguise, as though this nerve were a deep and shameful secret that needs to be swathed in many sheaths. Some don't even know they've screened this nerve from their own gaze, let alone another's. Some crudely mistake confession for introspection. Others, more cunning perhaps, open tempting shortcuts and roundabout passageways, the better to mislead everyone. Some can't tell whether they're writing to strip or hide that secret nerve.

- André Aciman

 

Nowadays you are supposed to be marketable. Or you are unmarketable. Within the marketable group there are the house slaves (professional class) and the field slaves (working class). But some of us don't even make it to the auction block.

- Carolyn Chute

 

The successful novel, on the other hand, has a shape much like a bell. We begin at the top of the bell, its tight curve. Every detail has purpose here: the way a woman tilts her head, the slant of light as one exits the subway, the repetition of a phrase. As soon as we have gained our bearings, we notice things beginning to open up, flaring outward the way a bell does. (…) It is this resonance, finally, that separates the successful novel from the others. The cast of major characters may be small or large, clowns or kings. The backdrop may be modest (a room) or ambitious (a continent). The vocabulary may be simple or flamboyant, literary or colloquial. The melody may be created by a single flute, or performed by an entire orchestra. But through it all, there's a sense that what we're seeing is not all that this is about.

- CHITRA DIVAKARUNI

 

Such experiences have convinced me that Cushing Strout, the Cornell critic, knows whereof he speaks in his brilliant book "The Veracious Imagination." He argues that the imagination is not simply a mental device that "makes things up." On the contrary, it is an intellectual tool, closely wedded to the writer's intelligence. What it chooses to imagine for a novel is integrally connected to the essence of what the writer, consciously or unconsciously, wants to say about the subject.

- THOMAS FLEMING

 

"To me the greatest pleasure of writing is not what it's about, but the music the words make."

- Truman Capote