Process Quotes

“He may have found himself ultimately unable to let go of the structure that teaching brought to his life.”
― Sarah Stodola, Process: The Writing Lives of Great Authors

“Genius, I have concluded, is the presence of not one ability but several that work together in tandem.”
― Sarah Stodola, Process: The Writing Lives of Great Authors

“The writing life can be a slog, with twelve-hour days in self-imposed isolation, endless rewrites, hundreds of pages discarded by ornery editors, and a life’s work dismissed at the stroke of an overly clever critic’s pen. Writers tend to live within their own minds, rarely working with others, socializing with their comrades largely to gripe about the publishing industry, not to collaborate in the midst of a project.”
― Sarah Stodola, Process: The Writing Lives of Great Authors

“Orwell came to denounce Basic English as a negative force on nuanced thinking, then caricatured it with the propagandizing Newspeak.”
― Sarah Stodola, Process: The Writing Lives of Great Authors

“no single influence stands out in those early years, but the cumulative education they offered provided a clear foundation for her own writing career. In the absence of traditional schooling or literary mentors in her life, these books were her teachers, showing Wharton how to go about writing good prose.”
― Sarah Stodola, Process: The Writing Lives of Great Authors

“Price has always read widely and voraciously, and continues to do so today; “I read so much I can’t tell you what I read on Wednesday,” he has said.”
― Sarah Stodola, Process: The Writing Lives of Great Authors

“At some point, thrilling though it may be, the revision has to stop. “There’s a line between revision and fretting, just working it to death,” she says.”
― Sarah Stodola, Process: The Writing Lives of Great Authors

“Kafka was hardly able to separate the writing of literature from life itself.”
― Sarah Stodola, Process: The Writing Lives of Great Authors

“To paraphrase Salman Rushdie, writing can be a grueling, unforgiving business, but even at its worst it’s better than having a regular job.”
― Sarah Stodola, Process: The Writing Lives of Great Authors

“Joyce was remarkably consistent in his sluggish, patient progress. Before Ulysses, he worked on his first two books, Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, for ten years collectively. By the time he arrived at his final work, Finnegans Wake, the pace had slowed even further: He gave a full fifteen over to that book,474 and never during that time felt inadequate, or that his talent may have slipped. Just the opposite, in fact: “I have discovered I can do anything with language I want,”
― Sarah Stodola, Process: The Writing Lives of Great Authors

“Hemingway often took notes on his trips and other adventures—he annoyed everyone by doing so incessantly on one particular fishing trip in the Pyrenees in his twenties—but never named note-taking as a central device in his process. He didn’t make a point of taking notes or making outlines before starting a novel. He did, however, emphasize the importance of constant observation. “If a writer stops observing he is finished. But he does not have to observe consciously nor think how it will be useful. Perhaps that would be true at the beginning. But later everything he sees goes into the great reserve of things he knows or has seen.”465”
― Sarah Stodola, Process: The Writing Lives of Great Authors

“You put down the words in hot blood, like an argument, and correct them when your temper has cooled.”460”
― Sarah Stodola, Process: The Writing Lives of Great Authors

“I can’t possibly go on as a responsible prose artist and also a believer in the impulses of my own heart and in the beauty of pure spontaneous language if I let editors take my sentences . . . and riddle them with commas, cut them by half, in threes, in fours, ruining the swing, making what was reasonably wordy prose even more wordy and unnaturally awkward (because castrated).”
― Sarah Stodola, Process: The Writing Lives of Great Authors

“(In one of the great ironies of literary history, Kerouac went to his grave having never learned to drive.)”
― Sarah Stodola, Process: The Writing Lives of Great Authors

“When you’re writing a novel,” he says, “it’s so easy to have odd bits of laziness slip in. Poetry is a way of reminding myself to pay attention to language”
― Sarah Stodola, Process: The Writing Lives of Great Authors

“To write a book is to make a Faustian contract in reverse. To gain immortality, or at least posterity, you lose, or at least ruin, your actual daily life.”
― Sarah Stodola, Process: The Writing Lives of Great Authors

“On Valentine’s Day 1989, the prosaic customs of Rushdie’s daily routine were interrupted in a way that most writers can hardly imagine. On that day, the Iranian ayatollah issued a call for his death for alleged crimes against Islam committed by writing The Satanic Verses. Rushdie immediately went into hiding under the protection of the British government, and was clandestinely relocated to at least thirty different houses and flats over the following few years.”
― Sarah Stodola, Process: The Writing Lives of Great Authors

“Rushdie then writes for four hours or so, during which he might write two to four pages319—over the years, he’s learned that beyond that chunk of time, the output becomes mush.”
― Sarah Stodola, Process: The Writing Lives of Great Authors

“Salman Rushdie the man on the scene; Salman Rushdie, dater of models and hobnobber with the glitterati. If these personas are indeed part of the larger truth—and Rushdie does little to dispel the myths surrounding them—then they coexist in harmony with the man who approaches writing as a very serious endeavor, undertaken in quiet solitude.”
― Sarah Stodola, Process: The Writing Lives of Great Authors

“Place does not matter much, it is the relationship between the brain and the hand that poses some odd problems,” Nabokov once wrote.”
― Sarah Stodola, Process: The Writing Lives of Great Authors

“(“I write like a genius”)”
― Sarah Stodola, Process: The Writing Lives of Great Authors

“A DAY IN THE WRITER’S LIFE . . . Virginia Woolf awoke early every morning, either at her home in London or the country house in Sussex, and breakfasted with her husband. Around 9:30 a.m., they both retreated to their respective writing rooms, hers an explosion of muddle—books, papers, odds and ends—where, assuming she was well, Woolf would sit in her armchair, plywood board on her lap, to work on her latest piece of fiction until 12:30 or 1 p.m., when she would break for lunch. In the afternoon, she would almost always take a walk, write in her diary, or work on an essay. Teatime came in the late afternoon. Then, before dinner, she would sometimes make revisions, sometimes read, or sometimes even see friends. The nighttime hours were for reading or socializing—her mind, she claimed, was no longer fit for writing after the sun went down.”
― Sarah Stodola, Process: The Writing Lives of Great Authors

“Bloomsbury Group was born. She was a central member of this loose collection of intellectuals that favored the pursuit of art, knowledge, and enjoyment over the time’s prevailing values, in which bourgeois propriety and public service ruled the day.”
― Sarah Stodola, Process: The Writing Lives of Great Authors

“She tended to latch on to writers who fell into one of two categories: those who simply wrote beautifully, and those who challenged the rules of fiction or other conventions in ways that appealed to her own goals to experiment with words through fiction and to use fiction to probe consciousness—conventional plot was never a primary component of her work. But it was the act of reading itself, more than any one or two or seven writers, that influenced Woolf, as a daily exercise in intellectual stimulation and as a means of revving the engine for her own work.”
― Sarah Stodola, Process: The Writing Lives of Great Authors

“The Newspeak of 1984 was inspired largely by the work of the linguist and philosopher C. K. Ogden, who created a simplified version of English that he believed would become a universal language. Early on, Orwell was a proponent of Basic English, as Ogden named it—it satisfied Orwell’s admiration for straightforward, clear language. But in the years just before writing 1984, Orwell came to denounce Basic English as a negative force on nuanced thinking, then caricatured it with the propagandizing Newspeak.”
― Sarah Stodola, Process: The Writing Lives of Great Authors

“The rough draft is always a ghastly mess bearing little relation to the finished result, but all the same it is the main part of job,”
― Sarah Stodola, Process: The Writing Lives of Great Authors

“One can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one’s personality,” he wrote in “Why I Write.” Surely the pseudonym played some role in that effacement.”
― Sarah Stodola, Process: The Writing Lives of Great Authors

“By nature, he narrated his own life in his head, as if it were a story in midconstruction. “For fifteen years or more,” he wrote, “I was carrying out a literary exercise . . . [T]his was the making up of a continuous ‘story’ about myself, a sort of diary existing only in the mind.”
― Sarah Stodola, Process: The Writing Lives of Great Authors

“The total of three engagements Kafka entered into (twice with Bauer, the other with Julie Wohryzek, a poor hotel chambermaid) disintegrated, generally speaking, because of Kafka’s inability to envision any kind of what we today call work-life balance. His asceticism was meant to foster his writing, but it also made him a largely unhappy person, which hampered his efforts. Near the end of his life, he wrote in his diary of the severity that led him to become a “physical wreck”: “I did not want to be distracted, did not want to be distracted by the pleasures life has to give a useful and healthy man.”
― Sarah Stodola, Process: The Writing Lives of Great Authors

“Solitude was a compulsory feature of Kafka’s writing process. “Being alone has a power over me that never fails,” he once wrote in his diary. “My interior dissolves (for the time being only superficially) and is ready to release what lies deeper.”6”
― Sarah Stodola, Process: The Writing Lives of Great Authors