Boiling Water
From George Saunders, on nuance and embracing complexity:
... See morethe writer doesn't have to have a fixed firm idea, but has to be able to take the reader on a journey to remind her that the world is complicated. From the very beginning, I understood writing to be about some kind of moral or ethical imperative. Absent that, I'm not that interested in it,
Word for word, this is the most insightful book on writing I’ve found.
7 of my favorite ideas from it:
1. Story as a Transfer of Energy
“We might think of a story as a system for the transfer of energy. Energy, hopefully, gets made in the early pages and the... See more
For the most part, novelists are trying to convert something present in their consciousness into a story. Yet there is an inevitable gap between the preexisting original and the new shape it is spawning. That creates a dynamic the novelist can use as a kind of lever in the fashioning of his narrative. This is quite a roundabout way to do things,
... See moreHaruki Murakami • Novelist as a Vocation
There Was Some Essential “Me-Ness” In It
For years, the writer George Saunders tried to write technically perfect stories. “I wrote story after story,” Saunders writes in A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, “and everything I wrote was minimal and strict and efficient and lifeless and humor-free, even though, in real life, I reflexively turned to humor at
... See moreSaunders describes reading student novels that churn their wheels endlessly, stuck in exposition, no escalation in sight. I’ve written a lot of stuff like that. It’s not enough that things keep happening. The things that happen need to build on each other and intensify, like a snowball growing in size and speed as it pursues some Looney Tunes... See more