“Whenever I’m asked why Southern writers particularly have a penchant for writing about freaks, I say it is because we are still able to recognize one. To be able to recognize a freak, you have to have some conception of the whole man, and in the South the general conception of man is still, in the main, theological. This is a large statement, and it is dangerous to make it, for almost anything you say about Southern belief can be denied in the next breath with equal propriety.

But approaching the subject from the standpoint of the writer, I think it is safe to say that while the South is hardly Christ-centered, it is most certainly Christ-haunted. The Southerner, who isn’t convinced of it, is very much afraid that he may have been formed in the image and likeness of God.

Ghosts can be very fierce and instructive. They cast strange shadows, particularly in our literature. In any case, it is when the freak can be sensed as a figure for our essential displacement that he attains some depth in literature.”

-Flannery O’Connor, “The Grotesque in Southern Fiction”

“It is worth mentioning, for future reference, that the creative power which bubbles so pleasantly in beginning a new book quiets down after a time, and one goes on more steadily. Doubts creep in. Then one becomes resigned. Determination not to give in, and the sense of an impending shape keep one at it more than anything”.

– Virginia Woolf

I’m compulsive. And I deeply think that it has to be something very neurotic. And I’m not joking. . . . I don’t have to do anything. Nothing. I can just sit around. But, suddenly it starts, you see. This terrible feeling that I am just wasting my life, I’m useless, I’m no good. Now, it’s a fact that if I spend a day busy as a little kitten, racing around. I do this, I do that. But I haven’t written, so it’s a wasted day, and I’m no good. How do you account for that nonsense?

- Doris Lessing (Bill Moyers Interview, PBS Now, January 24, 2003)

“I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.”

- Joan Didion

————

If you had to have one job, for the rest of your life, and you had to do it for free…what would it be?

It’s a basic enough question. One The Euro is always putting to people who complain to him about their work, who hate their jobs, who stress and second guess their chosen profession. And whenever they give him an answer his reply is always the same. “So, do it.”

Just like Joan, I adapted Orwell’s essay a few years ago. Looking back, my reasons sound pretty superficial. I should rewrite it; but I won’t. I’ll just do a giant strikethrough and add this instead:

I write because it comforts me to do so. It’s as simple and as complex as that. What about you?

Why do you write?

Socratic, romantic, nihilistic. Post modern. Honestly. Is there any wonder?

An Oxford professor once put it to me simply: Man invents wheel. Wheel rolls over man. Man dies. That’s irony. Not Alanis Morrisette.

Americans may not understand irony - Lord knows that’s the general European consensus, one I have pointed out to me on a daily basis - but I’m convinced those of us who don’t have never made an effort to do so in the first place. Either that, or we’re just way too optimistic. But that’s neither here nor there, really.

Me, I’m a polemical irony girl myself. Everything else is a shoddy imitation.

“Austen uses irony as a means of being understated. Swift, by contrast, uses irony for polemical purposes, conjuring grotesque images ironically (babies being eaten, mankind enslaved to the morally superior horse) in order to state his case (that the Irish were starving, that humanity was going to the dogs) ever more forcefully.” The Guardian

In 1946 George Orwell outlined his four great motives for writing in the essay “Why I Write”. He believed these motives exist, in different degrees, in every writer. I’d be lying if I said he wasn’t right. For me, it’s mostly about Aesthetic Enthusiasm. It’s also about a kind of peace that comes over me when I’m under no pressure to get it right. Or when I’ve finally pushed that boulder up the hill. I’d like to think I’m not as egocentric as Orwell but every writer has to have a little bit of ego going for her. Why else would she think her words important enough to preserve?

—————–

In Orwell’s own words. Why he writes:

Sheer Egoism - Desire to seem clever, to be talked about, to be remembered after death, to get your own back on the grown-ups who snubbed you in childhood, etc., etc.

Aesthetic Enthusiasm - Perception of beauty in the external world, or, on the other hand, in words and their right arrangement. Pleasure in the impact of one sound on another, in the firmness of good prose or the rhythm of a good story. Desire to share an experience which one feels is valuable and ought not to be missed.

Historical Impulse - Desire to see things as they are, to find out true facts and store them up for the use of posterity.

Political Purpose - Using the word ‘political’ in the widest possible sense. Desire to push the world in a certain direction, to alter other peoples’ idea of the kind of society that they should strive after. Once again, no book is genuinely free from political bias. The opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude.

“There seems something more speakingly incomprehensible in the powers, the failures, the inequalities of memory, than in any other of our intelligences.”

- Jane Austen, Mansfield Park

——————

Iaeger, West Virginia. Nineteen seventy nine. The old bus terminal that use to sit somewhere along the river bank. Maybe next to Sears & Roebuck? Maybe not. Maybe Sears & Roebuck came after it was already gone? I can’t remember. But I do remember the terminal; the diner it held. And it’s a memory from this diner that’s running away from me.

I keep trying to get my head around it. To see all the things I can already hear and smell and taste. But all I see is a plate. White. With a blue racing stripe around its edge.

The room smells of beef. The real kind. And of lettuce. It sounds like my grandfather. Loud and laughing. He’s sitting beside me. Telling a story. To men or to the air. I can’t see him; all I see is the plate. But he’s there. Just like the sun. Breaking through the windows, fracturing over hands and faces, lighting up the room.

My grandmother tells me to put my legs together. I’m in a dress. It’s Sunday. The day her husband doesn’t work. Church is over. She doesn’t use words, but I feel her hands on my knees and I know what they mean. They say things, my grandma’s hands. Like…

“Always be a lady; but be a smart one.”
“Men will fool you; but they will love you too.”
“Do and become; because I could not.”

Open up your mind to the possibility that 1+1 can equal 48, a Mercedes-Benz, an apple pie, a blue horse. Don’t tell your autobiography with facts, such as “I am in sixth grade. I am a boy. I live in Owatonna. I have a mother and father.” Tell me who you really are: “I am the frost on the window, the cry of a young wolf, the thin blade of grass.”

– Natalie Goldberg

“Each day is like an enormous rock that I’m trying to push up this hill. I get it up a fair distance, it rolls back a little bit, and I keep pushing it, hoping I’ll get it to the top of the hill and that it will go on its own momentum…I’ve never given up. I’ve always kept going. I don’t feel that I could afford to give up.”

- Joyce Carol Oates

———————

This has helped tremendously today. I feel like I’ve got a boulder on my back. My knees are about to buckle. I have to spend every ounce of energy I have in an effort to breathe - forget about being able to create.

It’s a hypothetical boulder, of course. Life is good and I’ve no real burden to bear. But the phrase ’squeezing blood out of a stone’ keeps coming to mind every time I sit down to write. It’s been this way for three days. I grow weary.

British novelist Arthur Quiller-Couch (pen name “Q”) published a series of lectures titled On the Art of Writing (1916) while serving as a professor of English at Cambridge University. Here he warns of purple prose…

“To begin with, let me plead that you have been told of one or two things which Style is not; which have little or nothing to do with Style, though sometimes vulgarly mistaken for it. Style, for example, is not–can never be–extraneous Ornament … ‘Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it –whole-heartedly–and delete it before sending your manuscript to press. ‘Murder your darlings.’

“…’How excellent a thing is sleep,’ sighed Sancho Panza; ‘it wraps a man round like a cloak’–an excellent example…of how to say a thing concretely: a Jargoneer would have said that ‘among the beneficent qualities of sleep its capacity for withdrawing the human consciousness from the contemplation of immediate circumstances may perhaps be accounted not the least remarkable.’ How vile a thing…!”

On the Art of Writing