Shirley Jackson: Memory and Delusion
newyorker.com
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Shirley Jackson: Memory and Delusion
"I cannot find any patience for those people who believe that you start writing when you sit down at your desk and pick up your pen and finish writing when you put down your pen again; a writer is always writing, seeing everything through a thin mist of words, fitting swift little descriptions to everything he sees, always noticing.
Just as I... See more
Just as I... See more
In his 2012 essay, “More people should write,” writer and programmer James Somers described this process as creating a mental bucket for an idea, thereby unleashing a magnetic force between that idea and the world:
... See moreWhen I have a piece of writing in mind, what I have, in fact, is a mental bucket: an attractor for and generator of thought. It’s like a
By writing fiction I have discovered some surprising things: for example that describing memories does not necessarily bring them to life. It can be the opposite: in the process of writing fiction I have overwritten some of my own memories. The act of writing has replaced them with something different, and I’ve effectively lost some of my own
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The noted neurologist and author Oliver Sacks had this to say about originality, in his essay “Prodigies” from the book An Anthropologist on Mars: Creativity, as usually understood, entails not only a “what,” a talent, but a “who”—strong personal characteristics, a strong identity, personal sensibility, a personal style, which flow into the talent,
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