You have to sit in the chair and fight the blankness. The pleasures of ordinary devotion.” Maggie Nelson The pleasure of obligation, the pleasure of dependency. The pleasure of insistence, of persistence. We will not be stuck in the permanent backspin of me, me, me.Īs Vonnegut says, we should be continually jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the way down. We will have made a shotgun leap in our consciousness. But if we write towards what we don’t supposedly know, we will find out what we knew but weren’t yet entirely aware of. It is logically and philosophically impossible to do otherwise. In the end your first-grade teacher was correct: we can, indeed, only write what we know. We find in others the ongoing of ourselves. Remember, the world is so much more than one story. They live in a cloud of their own limited nostalgia. But the truth is that the cynics are the sentimental ones. Get ready: they will label you sentimental. There is one simple word for this: empathy. The only true way to expand your world is to inhabit an otherness beyond ourselves. You have to propel yourself outward, young writer. In the end your navel contains only lint. She knows she wants to get somewhere, but she doesn’t know if the somewhere even exists yet. “The inexecutable is all I’m interested in.” Nathan Englanderĭon’t write what you know, write towards what you want to know.Ī writer is an explorer. It is, after all, a work of the imagination. Eventually you might go a quarter mile in the sky. Try walking a foot off the ground, then two feet, then three. The first line, like the first step, is only the first of many, yet it sets the shape of what is to come. Go ahead, then, walk the tightrope! Relax yourself into the tension of the wire. This, of course, is a bit like being told to walk a tightrope. You hit page 157 and you suddenly realise, Ah, that’s where I should have begun. Often the opening line won’t be found until you’re halfway through your first draft. At the same time, don’t panic if you don’t get it right first time around. Once you get your readers over the threshold, you can show them around the rest of the house. Don’t stuff the world into your first page. It should whisper in your reader’s ear that everything is about to change.īut take it easy too. It should move your story, your poem, your play, forward. It should plunge your reader into something urgent, interesting, informative. It should suggest that the world will never be the same again. It should reach in and twist your heart backward. ‘The first line, like the first step, is only the first of many.’ Illustration: Janne IivonenĪ first line should open up your rib cage. “The first sentence of every novel should be: ‘Trust me, this will take time but there is order here, very faint, very human.’” Michael Ondaatje So be adventurous in breaking – or maybe even making – the rules. And then they unsay it, and they keep unsaying it, breaking their own rules over and over again. They say it like nobody has ever said it before. They do it in order to remake the language. The great ones break the rules on purpose. To hell with structure, but only if you have thought it through so thoroughly that you can safely walk through your work with your eyes closed. To hell with plot, but you had better at some stage make something happen. To hell with formality, but only if you have learned what it means to be formal. To hell with grammar, but only if you know the grammar first. You must be prepared to hold two or more opposing ideas in the palms of your hands at the same time. Or if there are any rules, they are only there to be broken. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.” W Somerset Maugham “There are three rules for writing a novel. The tenacity to understand that it takes time and patience to succeed. Regret.Īll of these students, bar none, are looking, in Rilke’s words, “to say ecstasies that are unsayable”. There’s been weeping and gnashing of teeth. But let’s be honest, there has been burnout too. There’s been a National Book award for one student. I haven’t loved every minute of it, but I’ve loved most. ![]() That’s a lot of chalk and a lot of red pencil. I’ve been teaching now for the best part of 20 years. I have come across many such people – and indeed many such hours – during my writing and teaching life. Everybody who has ever felt the need to write knows the silent hour.
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