Quotes and stuff

[Medesha]

At the encouragement of Kman, I'm starting a thread to share the wise little tidbits I read in my various writing books. I have so many of them I want to share, but I'll try to limit myself to a moderate trickle. This one I read a while ago and something brought it to mind the other day:

"It is a lie to write in such a way as to be rewarded by the commercial market.

It is a lie to write in such a way as to be rewarded by fame offered you by some snobbish quasi-literary group in the intellectual gazettes.

The avant-garde liar kids himself he will be remembered for his pedantic lie.

The commercial liar, too, on his own level, kids himself that while he is slanting, it is only because the world is tilted; everyone walks like that!

You want fame and fortune, yes, but only as rewards for work well and truly done. Notoriety and a fat bank balance must come after everything else is finished and done. That means that they cannot even be considered while you are at the typewriter. The man who considers, lies in one of the two ways, to please a tiny audience that can only beat an Idea insensible and then to death, or a large audience that wouldn't know an Idea if it came up and bit them.

What is the greatest reward a writer can have? Isn't it that day when someone rushes up to you, his face bursting with honesty, his eyes afire with admiration and cries, 'That new story of yours was fine, really wonderful!'

Then and only then is writing worthwhile."

-Ray Bradbury, Zen and the Art of Writing

[Medesha]

I was in Barnes & Noble the other day stocking up on issues of Writer's Digest since I temporarily had a car. The lady at the checkout counter asked if I was writing a book, and when I said yes she told me all about her son and how he wanted to be a writer. I gave her some tips and jotted down the title of a great how-to-write book (Telling Lies for Fun and Profit by Lawrence Block, the best writing book evah as far as I'm concerned).

The lady thanked me and then said something along the lines of, "Wow, an encouraging writer who doesn't mind helping others out!" Since K-Man had said something similar to me before, I thought I would share a quote that I sent to him a few weeks ago. It's one to live by.

"There is no rational basis for comparison or competition in the arts. If somebody gets rich and famous faster than you, it may mean they're better at the craft than you are - or it may mean they happen to be telling stories that strike a nerve with a wider audience. What happens to other writers says nothing about you or your talent or your future. The writer you envy today will probably have reason to envy you tomorrow.

"And envy is poisonous. One person's success doesn't take anything away from you. If two people write brilliant books that are published the same day, the shine from one doesn't diminish the lustre of the other. If the audience goes crazy about one book and buys a million copies in a month that doesn't stop another book from selling a million copies the same month. In fact, the success of one sf book generally brings new readers into the field - some of whom will discover and love your works.

"One of the nicest things about the field of speculative fiction is how little envy there is. Older writers almost always reach out to help younger ones; younger ones almost always give honor to the older ones. Even where there are squabbles, there's almost always an underlying respect that wins out in the long run. The enemy of a good writer is never another writer - the enemy is apathy and unconcern in the audience. That's what you need to overcome if you're going to succeed in your art, and in that struggle we writers are all on the same side."

-Orson Scott Card, How To Write Science Fiction and Fantasy

[Medesha]

Some ramblings on dialogue and Lovecraft...

"Writers have different skill levels when it comes to dialogue. Your skills in this area can be improved, but, as a great man once said (actually it was Clint Eastwood), 'A man's got to know his limitations.' H.P. Lovecraft was a genius when it came to tales of the macabre, but a terrible dialogue writer. He seems to have known it, too, because in the millions of words of fiction he wrote, fewer than five thousand are dialogue.

"Lovecraft was, by all accounts, both snobbish and painfully shy (a galloping racist as well, his stories full of sinister Africans and the sort of scheming Jews my Uncle Oren always worried about after four or five beers), the kind of writer who maintains a voluminous correspondence but gets along poorly with others in person - were he alive today, he'd likely exist most vibrantly in various Internet chat-rooms. Dialogue is a skill best learned by people who enjoy talking and listening to others - particularly listening, picking up the accents, rhythms, dialect, and slang of various groups. Loners such as Lovecraft often write it badly, or with the care of someone who is composing in a language other than his or her native tongue.

"As with all other aspects of fiction, the key to writing good dialogue is honesty. And if you are honest about the words coming out of your characters' mouths, you'll find that you've let yourself in for a fair amount of criticism....You must tell the truth if your dialogue is to have the resonance and realism that Hart's War, good story thought it is, so sadly lacks - and that holds true all the way down to what folks say when they hit their thumb with the hammer. If you substitute "Oh sugar!" for "Oh s***!" because you're thinking about the Legion of Decency, you are breaking the unspoken contract that exists between writer and reader - your promise to express the truth of how people act and talk through the medium of a made-up story.

"Some people don't want to hear the truth, of course, but that's not your problem. What would be is wanting to be a writer without wanting to shoot straight. Talk, whether ugly or beautiful, is an index of character; it can also be a breath of cool, refreshing air in a room some people would prefer to keep shut up. In the end, the important question has nothing to do wtih whether the talk in your story is sacred or profane; the only question is how it rings on the page and in the ear. If you expect it to ring true, then you must talk yourself. Even more important, you must shut up and listen to others talk."

-Stephen King, On Writing

P.S. Feel free to comment on any of these quotes, argue, disagree or support them, or post your own. :-)

[K Man]

RE: Stephen King on Dialogue - "Amen to that...."
Dialogue can be tricky, I've been told that mine flows relatively well, to which I'm pleased because I'm always so worried about it.

RE: Stephen King on Lovecraft - "My eyes are open..."

He brings up alot of good points. Dialogue is not very prevalent in the stories and, mostly due to respect for the one man that gives me nightmares, I've never questioned it. It makes sense though and I agree, Lovecraft would probably hide out in internet chat rooms...that is...until he learned you can download 'Shoggoth.exe', then he would probably hide in a corner after burning his PC to a crisp.

[Medesha]

[On being a published writer]

"The other day, Sam [Lamott's son] and I were at the mall. I had a big event coming up onstage at the Herbst Theater, because I had just had a book published that was getting a lot of attention. I had decided to buy a new dress for the evening. So the two of us were just innocently walking around the store when the owner came up to me. She said, 'Are you looking for anything in particular?'

I said, 'Well, I have a special occasion coming up, and I need a new dress.'

She said, 'Is it for a dinner party?'

I said, 'No, actually, I'm doing something onstage.'

She said, 'Are you a singer?' and I felt the jungle drums start to beat, warning me to keep my mouth shut, warning me to send my ego to its room. But I had gotten used to the attention. I cleared my throat and toed the carpet and said, 'No, I'm a writer.'

She said, 'Oh, wow! I read absolutely everything. Tell me your name.'

I knew I was in trouble. I knew I was going to get nailed, but my ego had become Nelson Rockefeller, and it felt like mingling. My wiser self knew I was already too far in to stop now. I said, 'No, no, you won't have heard of me, and it'll make me feel terrible.'

She stood firm. 'Honest,' she said, 'I read everything.' Part of me believed I had become so famous that when I told her my name, she'd react as if Paul McCartney had just dropped into her store. The wiser part of me knew I was a goner for sure. I started to pray at that point, only I was praying to her: please, please don't make me tell you my name. I smiled demurely, like we'd had our fun and I'd better go get Sam, who was hiding under a rack of dresses and making rude noises.

'Beth, Beth,' the shop owner called out suddenly. 'Come here!' A young woman stepped out from the back room with an expectant look on her face. 'Beth,' the owner said, 'don't I read everything? Tell her!' Beth said yes, yes, this is true, she reads everything. Then the owner looked at me kindly, and said, 'Now come on, what's your name?'

I sighed, smiled, and finally said, 'Anne Lamott.' She stared at me with great concern. The room was very quiet, except for Sam under the dress rack. Then she pursed her lips and slowly shook her head. 'No,' she said, 'I guess not.'

It took me about a week and a great deal of cheap chocolate to get over that."

-Bird by Bird, by Anne Lamott

[John McMullen]

Quoting King:

Medesha said:

Some ramblings on dialogue and Lovecraft...


"Lovecraft was, by all accounts, both snobbish and painfully shy (a galloping racist as well, his stories full of sinister Africans and the sort of scheming Jews my Uncle Oren always worried about after four or five beers)

I'll just disagree slightly: Lovecraft's earlier work really is full of all of those sinister Africans and scheming Jews, but that changes toward the end of his career; maybe marrying a Jew helped (they did divorce, but you have to think that if he was a total racist at that time he wouldn't have married her in the first place). The later stories, it seems to me, have less of that sort of material in them.

And yes, there are very few bits of dialogue, though one might be able to count the first-person narrative stories as dialogue: they are certainly the creation of a particular voice and rhythm.

Something I've done as a writing exercise (not with any intent to publish) is rewrite some short Lovecraft stories to see if I can get the same effect but playing to my strengths. Sometimes I can; sometimes I can't even get away from the structure he has set up.

[Medesha]

"Writing stories is sitting alone in a quiet room, without distraction, face-to-face with yourself. We need seclusion to see the world, need to close our eyes to watch our characters. As Pascal knew, diversion is both our consolation and our misery. It passes the time and helps us forget that we are dying. As writers of stories, however, we don't have time to kill, and our only job is to confront the human condition, to say that this is what life is like and this is how it feels. Every story should be a plunge into reality, not an escape from it. In America we are obsessed with diversion and amusement. We clutter our lives with distraction, with televisions and stereos and TVs and DVDs and radios and telephones. We got to movies, sporting events, we shop, we drive. We do everything we can to stay out of that quiet room, to avoid the recognition of our mortality.

"But death is the central truth of our existence - the sadness at our core. Everything we love will vanish. We can't hold on to anything. It is this tragedy that accounts as well for the beauty and nobility of our lives because in the face of this knowledge, we go right on loving, trying to hold on to what we cherish, defying death with hubris and with faith.

"Introspection without distraction. You sit and face the blank and innocent page with anxiety and confusion, with doubt and uncertainty. You write because you insist on meaning and you can't, for whatever reason, rely only on Faith or Science to provide it. Faith, Nietzsche told us, is not wanting to know the truth. Science is God's story (or it's Nature's). You crave a person's story. You want meaning, but not answers. Fiction writers understand that there are no answers, simple or otherwise. The point is not to answer, but to question, not to solve, but to seek, not to preach, but to explore, not to assure, but to agitate."

-John Dufresne, The Lie That Tells A Truth

[Toptomcat]

"I hate quotations. Tell me what you know."
-Emerson
;D

[Zarni]

Funny famous last words I just thought I'd share with you: (can't remember the guy's name, but that's not important)

Whoeverthismanwas had been ill in bed for some time, and a nurse was attending him at his home; some friends came over to see how he was, and were told:

'Oh, he's much better than yesterday! His condition's really improving!'

At which point Whoeverthismanwas promptly turned over, said: 'On the contrary.' and snuffed it.