10/30/09 From Anna Quindlen's novel, BLESSINGS
"There were deer in the fields that surrounded the house, cropping the rye grass with their spotted fawns at their flanks. But the fields stretched so far from the drive on either side, and the deer kept so close to the tree line, that the does did not even raise their divot heads from the ground as the car slid past."
10/28/09 From THE FIFTH SEASON by Linda Busby Parker
"I'm reading the Bible cover to cover," Mary Ella said. "It's not that I want to grab hold of some kind of magic. The Bible is not a rabbit's foot, her voice raised slightly as a child might speak. She pushed lightly against the porch floor with her small feet clad in light blue satin slippers, fleur-de-lis in navy-blue across the toes. "I want to do it. I've never read the book from first word to last. I've always said I would, and the time has come."
10/27/09 Quote of The Day from THE FIFTH SEASON by Linda Busby Parker
"A chill started at the nape of Estella's neck, ran like the flash of a strobe light up to the center of her head. When the flash reached the top of her skull, it traveled back down her head again, and swept across her shoulders, and down her arms where her skin transformed into gooseflesh . . . She could not take her eyes off Mary Ella, who nearly glowed with subdued light. The luminosity of life--yes luminosity--seeped out of her, the radiant lavender-blue of phosphorescence . . . Light oozed from her skin and there was nothing that could be done to prevent it--her skin no longer sealed life inside."
10/26/09 From my own novel-in-process, THE FIFTH SEASON
"My own backyard is like the tropics. Jungly. It's lush as a salad field." Aubert Bodet
10/24/09 from introduction to EDITOR TO AUTHOR, the collected letters of Maxwell Perkins
"When a writer has written his masterpiece he will often be certain that the whole thing is worthless. The perpetrator of the dimmest literary effort, on the other hand, is apt to be invincibly cocksure and combative about it."
10/23/09 from Vivian Gornick's book, THE SITUATION AND THE STORY
"Every work of literature has both a situation and a story. The situation is the context or circumstance, sometimes the plot; the story is the emotional experience that preoccupies the writer: the insight, the wisdom, the thing one has come to say."
10/19/09 From John Casey's essay titled "Meanwhile Back at the Ranch," in SEWANEE WRITERS ON WRITING
"The only definition of a novel that I remember is an old joke: a novel is a long piece of prose that has something wrong with it."
10/13/09 From Eudora Welty's ONE WRITER'S BEGINNINGS
Eudora Welty's mother, like all mothers, hoped her children as young adults would select jobs that made them happy, but, at the same time, offered safety from the world's great dangers. Welty wrote: "But I think she was relieved when I chose to be a writer of stories, for she thought writing was safe."
10/12/09 From Ernest Hemingway's, GREEN HILLS OF AFRICA
"Writers should work alone. They should see each other only after their work is done, and not too often . . . Otherwise they become like writers in New York. All angleworms in a bottle, trying to derive knowledge and nourishment from their own contact and from the bottle."
10/9/09 from Richard Russo in his essay, "In Defense of Omniscience" in BRINGING THE DEVIL TO HIS KNEES, Editors: Baxter and Turchi
"But it's a sweet, lovely, rich, generous stick shift of a technique, and it'll take you places you can't go with an automatic transmission. The first few times you try it, it'll buck you all over the narrative road and send you fleeing back to the vehicle you already know how to drive, wondering what perversity would make anyone want to make a hard job harder."
--On using the omnisicient point of view--
10/6/09 from Ernest Hemingway, ON WRITING
"All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you; the good and the bad, the ecstacy, the remorse and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was."
From Silas House's Novel CLAY'S QUILT
"It was hot and white, and all up the hillsides, tangled trumpet vines wilted and thirsted. The blacktop of the parking lot glistened, so soft that it threatened to seep down the hillside. There was only the hint of a breeze and it felt as forced and tired as the heavy-footed men who made their way out of the coal mine."
10/3/09 from Anne Lamott's BIRD BY BIRD
"The very first thing I tell my new students on the first day of a workshop is that good writing is about telling the truth. We are a species that needs and wants to understand who we are. Sheep lice do not seem to share this longing, which is one reason they write so very little."
10/2/09 from Anna Quindlen's novel, BLESSINGS
"The moonlight slipping at an oblique angle through the windows and the windshield of the car picked out what there was of her to be seen; a suggestion of the whites of her eyes between the curtains of her hair, the beads of sweat on her arched upper lip, the silver chain around her neck, the chipped maroon polish on her nails--a jigsaw puzzle of a girl, half the pieces not visible."
10/1/09 from Mary Hood's short story "How Far She Went"
"The girl walked close behind her, exactly where she walked, matching her pace, matching her stride, close enough to put her hand forth (if the need arose) and touch her granny's back where the faded voile was clinging damp, the merest gauze between their wounds."
9/30/09 Charles Baxter, BURNING DOWN THE HOUSE
Hell is story-friendly. If you want a compelling story, put your protagonist among the damned. The mechanisms of hell are nicely attuned to the mechanisms of narrative. Not so the pleasures of Paradise. Paradise is not a story. It's about what happens when the stories are over.
9/29/09 From Edward P. Jones' short story, "First Day"
"One monkey don't stop no show."
Comments