What About the Baby? Quotes

“Perhaps the world as it is, as we find it, is incomplete, inaccessible, unacceptable without the filter of art. Perhaps because the unexamined life is not worth living and writing fiction is our way of examining life. Perhaps because a story or a character or language itself compels us. Because we are compelled. Because we must. And so with no guarantee of the outcome, but with a passionate intuition, we begin the pursuit—the story, the novel, the poem.”
― Alice McDermott, What About the Baby?: Some Thoughts on the Art of Fiction

“Overexposure to the pointed, posed, propagandized, insincere novels with a lesson to teach and an agenda to impose, has diminished our ability to be affected by true art.”
― Alice McDermott, What About the Baby?: Some Thoughts on the Art of Fiction

“Because I am a Catholic, I find that the notion of the sacramental—of the ordinary transformed into the extraordinary, of outward signs of inner grace—appeals to me and so finds its way into my work. Because I am a Catholic, the language of ritual, its repetitions and refrains, appeals to me and so finds its way into my work.”
― Alice McDermott, What About the Baby?: Some Thoughts on the Art of Fiction

“YOU FREQUENTLY VIOLATE THESE RULES and then listed his own ten rules for good writing: Write to express, not to impress. Be proud of what you write. Rewrite always. Limit forms of the verb “to be.” Choose the exact word. Avoid clichés. Use cautiously simile, metaphor, and personification. Set inanimate objects against one another. Vary sentence structure. Create transitions. Proof your clean copy. If”
― Alice McDermott, What About the Baby?: Some Thoughts on the Art of Fiction

“I copied John Steinbeck, for instance: If there is a magic in story writing, and I am convinced there is, no one has ever been able to reduce it to a recipe that can be passed from one person to another. The formula seems to lie solely in the aching urge of the writer to convey something he feels important to the reader. If the writer has that urge, he may sometimes, but by no means always, find the way to do it. I copied this from Annie Dillard: Write as if you were dying. At the same time, assume you write for an audience consisting solely of terminal patients. That is, after all, the case. What would you begin writing if you knew you would die soon? What could you say to a dying person that would not enrage by its triviality? And”
― Alice McDermott, What About the Baby?: Some Thoughts on the Art of Fiction

“Little wonder that both Helprin and Morrison, in depicting grief, illustrate, too, the frustrating inadequacy of language. “It was not enough.” And yet it’s all we’ve got. I expect fiction to be inspired.”
― Alice McDermott, What About the Baby?: Some Thoughts on the Art of Fiction