Pity the Reader: On Writing with Style

Shapes of text are like clothing: they’re what content wears.

You will be writing about your own life anyway, but you won’t know it, if you write a hack western—or not a hack western, if you write an excellent western like High Noon. Because somewhere in there is the coded psychiatric problem of the author. And if you write an episode for some space program on television, this will somehow parallel things tha

The intensity of good or ill fortune is expressed by the tale-teller, in exposition or in the reactions of characters in his tale. If something seemingly bad or good happens in a tale, and neither the tale-teller nor his characters are impressed, then nothing much has really happened.335

Talent is required. But it’s only one of the components for creating good fiction. And being possessed of less than superlative gifts doesn’t mean you shouldn’t pursue writing.

You can steal a plot.

You can start anywhere and keep on going and see where it leads you, parting the layers of fat on your brain until your consciousness emerges, reeling your own tape out of your own mouth.

“You have to sit there,” as Kurt said. “It’s physically uncomfortable, it’s physically bad for someone to sit still that long, and it’s socially bad for a person to be alone that much. The working conditions are really bad. Nobody has ever found the solution to that.”44

Any artist of any kind has to be able to stomach falling short of the mark, continually, in all kinds of ways. But perhaps especially when starting out.

One of the hardest lessons for novice writers to realize is that caring alone, no matter what you’ve been through or what story you have to tell, doesn’t matter in terms of rendering the successful creation of your work. It’s not your story that matters. It’s how you tell it.