ANN PATCHETT ON WRITING NOVELS

Ann Patchett by Heidi Ross

Oh dear - this is so true:

'When I can’t think of another stall, when putting it off has actually become more painful than doing it, I reach up and pluck the butterfly from the air. I take it from the region of my head and I press it down against my desk, and there, with my own hand, I kill it. It’s not that I want to kill it, but it’s the only way I can get something that is so three-dimensional onto the flat page. Just to make sure the job is done I stick it into place with a pin. Imagine running over a butterfly with an SUV. Everything that was beautiful about this living thing – all the color, the light and movement – is gone. What I’m left with is the dry husk of my friend, the broken body chipped, dismantled, and poorly reassembled. Dead. That’s my book.' Ann Patchett

And the more 'hopeful' bit:

'The journey from the head to hand is perilous and lined with bodies. It is the road on which nearly everyone who wants to write – and many of the people who do write – get lost... Only a few of us are going to be willing to break our own hearts by trading in the living beauty of imagination for the stark disappointment of words.'

More here at Brain Pickings.

'Good Writing vs Talented Writing'

Back from Spain, exhausted, my mind full of new ideas and insights about language and literature, so generously offered at the AEDEI conference in Cáceres.

Despite tiredness, I had a long convo with my husband this evening about adequate vs brilliant writers, writerly 'career' trajectories, PR opps and luck etc.. I then found this article 'Good Writing vs Talented Writing' by Maria Popova, on the ever brilliant Brain Pickings site. It says all I wanted to say but didn't articulate.

I get fed up reading hyped books that fall far short. Spare me from the ordinary, mundane prose of so many writers and the overblown PR that goes along with them.

In the article Popova talks about the book About Writing: Seven Essays, Four Letters, and Five Interviews by author and literary critic Samuel Delany in which he synthesizes insights from thirty-five years of teaching CW.
 
This quote I love:

'The talented writer often uses rhetorically interesting, musical, or lyrical phrases that are briefer than the pedestrian way of saying “the same thing.” The talented writer can explode, as with a verbal microscope, some fleeting sensation or action, tease out insights, and describe subsensations that we all recognize, even if we have rarely considered them before; that is, he or she describes them at greater length and tells more about them than other writers.' 

Also:

'Either in content or in style, in subject matter or in rhetorical approach, fiction that is too much like other fiction is bad by definition.'

And:

'Good writing is clear. Talented writing is energetic. Good writing avoids errors. Talented writing makes things happen in the reader’s mind — vividly, forcefully — that good writing, which stops with clarity and logic, doesn’t.

Why is so much ordinary fiction taken as being good? Why are many so-so books given acres of attention in the media etc.? Why do agents and publishers, both, seem to love the mediocre and mundane? It all baffles me, I have to say.