Writing

Lillian Fishman on Sally Rooney on the Relative Value of Experience

“This was the first time it crossed my mind that a young woman like us — a knowledge worker, a writer, a leftist — might regret her independent youth and wish she had married a loving person at a young age. I’d associated this idea with a type of womanhood we considered totally outside of our zone of interest: anti-intellectualism, a belief in the primacy of motherhood. I was blindsided by the suggestion that we might be better people if we were recused from formative independence and struggle. I looked around at my friends and acquaintances, especially the married ones, and wondered if there was any truth in the idea that the years they spent as poor captains of their own ships, unmoored and often lonely, were in fact not remotely necessary or enlightening.

Why did no one else find this proposition shocking? It was such a clear transgression against the entire prevailing ethos of young womanhood (at least in liberal contexts). Critics were concerned with whether Eileen’s happy ending with Simon constituted a more regressive romantic ending than we’d seen in Rooney’s prior novels, but there was no preoccupation with this regret on Eileen’s part. Is that because one is liable, in extreme love, to suddenly wish all kinds of self-negating and previously inconceivable things? Did we read this and think we knew better: that when Eileen grows accustomed to her marriage, she’ll be glad that she had the chance to grow up among her friends before she and Simon came together? Or maybe this is the essential quality which separates a romance from a novel: in a romance a woman must be rescued from circumstances which are sad, inadequate, grief-filled, wasteful. Perhaps a romance is less powerful if it acknowledges all those other little placeholders and consolation prizes (friends, work, art) which we pretend can make us balanced and happy.”

https://substack.com/home/post/p-157673192?source=queue

Barbara McClay on Eliot’s *Ash Wednesday*

“In addition to reading these online poems over and over—as if they were some sort of texts from a lost civilization about which nothing more could be known, instead of (again) poems that were in books that were probably in my very own home—I would carefully copy and paste anything that struck me as a good epigraph for a chapter of a novel into a WordPerfect document that I’m almost positive was called something like “good quotes.” I probably copied, conservatively, at least two thirds of “Ash Wednesday,” because its language thrilled me.

At the time, I’m not sure I even slightly understood what it meant to say “I do not hope to know / the infirm glory of the positive hour” or what it meant to hope to turn again or any of the rest of it.3 I certainly had already accumulated regrets at that point in my life, some of which could eat into me very deeply and even keep me awake at night. But I did not associate them at all with the poem.4 Reading it now, listening to Eliot read it, I understand it better.”

https://substack.com/home/post/p-158401105?source=queue

James Dickey, author of Deliverance, a Character

“JOHN LOGUE: Dickey was mischievous from the first day I ever knew him. We went to eat at a Japanese restaurant, the kind where they chop everything up. The chef chopped-chopped-chopped right near Dickey and, all of a sudden, it looked like the end of Dickey’s finger popped into his vodka, bleeding. Dickey screamed and the chef almost fainted. Well, Dickey had taken a shrimp and dipped it in ketchup and just as the guy chopped near him, Dickey flipped it in his drink. That was typical Dickey.”

Delivering ‘Deliverance’

Alan Jacobs on his Writing Methods

“Now, to be sure, I always have at least one and usually two writing projects going on, and I’m working on something almost every day — but the working doesn’t always mean writing words. I can’t write words until the words are ready to be written, and sometimes they might not be ready until I’ve read and re-read books, until I’ve made and then deleted and re-made outlines, until I’ve re-ordered my index cards in half-a-dozen ways, or — this is most common — until I’ve just sat in my chair and thought for a long time about what I need to say. Then I write.

So it’s not uncommon for me to go ten days or even two weeks without writing a single word that ends up in the book or essay I’m working on, and then write 6000 words in a morning. I’ve learned not to force it, I’ve learned to recognize the symptoms of readiness — and maybe more important, learned to note and heed the absence of such symptoms. Whenever I have tried to do the 500-words-per-day thing I’ve just ended up with more stuff to delete. My job, as I understand it, is to wait patiently and be ready when the words are ready.”

From Alan’s blog.