This is my introduction to this page: scroll down to reach the cumulative selection of quotations and my thoughts on them.
I don't know about you, but I love collecting quotations by writers - about themselves, about their friends and enemies, about their social or historical context and most of all about their art: what it means to them, what the joys and frustrations are, what methods and techniques they've discovered to help with the process of composition, what advice, warnings and encouragement they offer us - I'm an addict of all this.
As regularly as I can, I'll post a new quotation on this page - I hope you enjoy them and find them useful.
To start us off, the poet Alexander Pope once said:
True wit is nature to advantage dressed
What oft was thought but ne'er so well expressed.
There you have it in a nutshell - whether it's a nifty little aphorism, a barbed piece of wit, a meditative observation, or whether it's a wallopping great 900 page novel, we as readers recognise when a writer has hit the mark. We feel admiration, sometimes awe, frequently envy - because that writer at that moment has caught feeling, thought and meaning in the perfect sequence of words. Perhaps that writer, three minutes later, would no longer have had the ability to capture that thought in quite that way. (Have you ever looked back at something you wrote on a good day and felt pride and a kind of bewilderment that you, you, were the one who wrote that?)
Writing's like that - it's a strange and wondrous alchemy, all too often as elusive as the legendary elixir of youth ...
but sometimes the magic happens.
26th August 2010
Thrillers depend on ... obvious devices, but great novels are psychological as well as physical in action, and a first-rate novelist must have psychological insight, as well as a story and a style.
Robertson Davies
You may well have heard about how novels can be divided into 'plot-led' and 'character-led' stories. Robertson Davies points out that the action-packed bangs and whistles of a thriller limit that genre and prevent it being 'great'. However, we could argue that it's a case of horses for courses: certain types of genre fiction don't demand all that much psychological depth - and certainly, we expect great literary fiction to provide us with profound meaning, powerful use of language and characters so vibrant they may end up etched into the collective unconscious. If you're writing a thriller, though, you're not obligated to cut your characters out of cardboard! You still need to give the reader a sense of their past and of their complexities, and guide the reader through the 'arc' of their story, intertwining the main character's development or disintegration with the rollercoaster plot and the villains and the femmes fatales and the gizmos. It's not a case of either/or - it's a case of flexing your writerly muscles no matter whether you're 'literary' or 'commercial'.
14th August 2010
Submitting is a learning curve.
Julia Churchill, The Greenhouse Agency
Submitting your manuscript, when the time comes (and remember, it's crucial not to be premature with this: wait until the MS is as good as it can be), can be hearbreaking. All writers have to deal with rejection and it can be brutally painful to have the work you love and have slaved over dismissed out of hand. What's important - because, believe me, it will happen to you - is how you handle rejection. There are good rejections, where the agent or editor has taken the time to give some reasons for why they turned your work down. There are horrible rejections without, it seems to you, rhyme or reason: rejections after months of waiting; abrupt or cruel phrases cast your way. In both cases, you have to follow a process. Allow yourself to feel both hurt and rage, but limit the time you will let yourself indulge in this. Detach yourself, if you can, and try to take a dispassionate look at why you were turned down. All too often it's beyond your control: the market isn't right, the publisher just signed somebody like you, the editor's taste was not for what you write. So you need to examine whether there were any issues there that you feel you can influence. Did you pitch to the right person? Was your query letter worded as well as it could be? Did you summarise the point and market of your book well enough? Was your synopsis economical and engaging? Go back and work on it some more: synopses and pitches are like the book itself: you draft, re-draft and re-draft some more. You should never settle for 'it'll do': you should always want to improve. Good luck!
20th July 2010
If you wait long enough, I learned, and stuff your eyeballs with shapes, sizes and colors, the gumball machine in your skull lends you gifts at the drop of a penny.
Ray Bradbury
It's now high summer and you may be on holiday or about to go on holiday. Enjoy the sun, sand and sangria, of course - but this is a time to welcome playfulness of the mind, too. Carry your notebook with you, watch and listen, jot down what you hear and see and feel. Let ideas come to you, be open to what's possible. Invite connections, take advantage of this precious time away from the humdrum to rediscover your writing mojo!
7th July 2010
High creativity is responding to situations without critical thought.
John Cleese
Sometimes we spend too much time analysing all spontaneity and freedom out of what we do. Now, as a teacher and editor, it's my job to analyse - and we can all benefit from careful critical thought, planning and revision. But there is the danger of being too self-aware, too self-conscious - and this leads to inhibition. If you throw a baby in a swimming-pool (not that I advocate that!), it doesn't consider the depth of the water, the distance to the edge, the muscular strength of its limbs: it just paddles. It swims. So, when you're trying to free up your creativity, don't think. Just do. Push the critical self away - you can bring that part of you back later, when you've produced something it can work on. There's the pool: jump in.
2nd July 2010
I know that there is a story there in the way that a prospector knows that there is oil under the ground.
Terry Pratchett
However the initial idea comes to you - whether it's during a dreamy meditation while out walking the dog, or while reading a feature in a newspaper, or hearing somebody tell an anecdote or reading a biography or history book - I'm sure you've all experienced that 'Aha!' moment, when you just know that there's something there. Something that has the potential to grow into a story, something which can be moulded and shaped and perhaps taken a long way from the original kernel of idea. Be open, at all times, to the potential of story. Be a prospector: there's gold in them thar yarns.
May 31st 2010
Point of view is the window that you, the fiction writer, open onto your imaginary world.
Jenny Newman
First of all, many apologies for the delay in posting a new literary quotation: readers of my blog will know that the past month has been a challenging one. I've chosen this quotation because point of view is going to be the topic I'll be covering in my mini-course at the Winchester Writers' Conference on 25th June - visit http://www.writersconference.co.uk if you're interested in finding out more. All I'll say here is that choosing point of view in your story is one of the most important decisions you'll make when you write it. This can be a challenging thought - but also an exciting one!
April 22nd 2010
Writing, being a lonely profession, requires warmth and passion if it is to manifest itself to its full potential. It also feeds on encouragement and empathy as well as full access to those whose advice is significant and who can help to make things happen.
Naim Atallah
This is quite a long quotation with self-evident meaning. Naim Attalah is a publisher, here writing about the role of agents - or at least the role he thinks they should play. I'm sure you've heard a great deal about how you'll need an agent to tout your MS around, to link you to the right editors, to negotiate the deal and make sure you're not ripped off. But what we lose sight of quite often is that, even with agent-representation, writers can feel uncherished. We need a personal concern with us as writers, we need involvement, understanding, support and decent levels of communication. So much of writing is waiting for a response, waiting for validation. I hope that you've found your writing support-system: loyal friends, loved ones, people like me who'll take the time to look at your work with a caring yet realistic eye - and ultimately an agent who will fight your individual corner and a publisher who will find the best way to bring your book to the public. Adversity may make us stronger, more determined. Equally, it may make us wither away. A bit of sunshine doesn't do any harm!
April 1st 2010
Don't say the old lady screamed - bring her on and let her scream.
Mark Twain
Now, I'm sure you tired of hearing that old chestnut: Show, Don't Tell. I'm often asked what that means or where the boundary between showing and telling lies. Like all rules, it's not meant to be universally binding. The thing is this: sometimes, as an omniscient narrator, you will be telling the reader what's going on. You may well want to say 'The old lady screamed.' No problem with that. Where the problem lies is in a story which is nothing but telling, where the reader is not drawn into scenes, invited to empathise, convinced by the strength of the writing that they're actually in that scene. Telling can be flat, banal, dull, with no variation of tone. Creating a scene which leads up to the screaming, where the reader hears the wavering beat of the old lady's frightened heart, sees with her the shadows beyond a door that should not be open, feels the crackle of paper in her withered hand as she unfolds the letter that reveals a dreadful secret, senses the rising panic as she claps a hand over her mouth in vain, trying to restrain the scream which bursts, high-pitched ... See what I mean? Telling is not convincing. Telling is not involving. Showing gives your reader vicarious experience and an emotional link to what happens next. It needn't be an old lady screaming - it could be the savour of strawberries on the tongue, the slide of pebbles by the sea, the glare of light through a high-rise window. Describe what your character is experiencing, using all or any of the senses and your reader will experience it too. You've guided them to making an emotional investment in your story.
March 19th 2010
The only way you can create a character is through observation ... I think there's something in writers of fiction that makes them notice things and store them away all the time. Writers of fiction are collectors of useless information.
William Trevor
To be a writer you need to cultivate a magpie mind: you need to be always on the watch, on the prowl, for what will be useful. My grandmother kept a button box - whenever a garment was worn out she'd snip off the buttons and chuck them in there, so that if the need arose she could root around and find a suitable one for a shirt, a jacket, a coat, a baby cardigan. We writers have notebooks and they're the equivalent of the attic, the lumber room, the button box. If anything catches your attention - a line of dialogue, the way somebody's hair looks in the sunshine, the right image to describe somebody's gait, the house seen from the passing car that seems to announce who would be living there - chuck it all in the button box - you'll find a use for it someday. Cultivate your beady magpie eye - there's so much out there to be noticed, and who knows what kind of garment you can design, even if you just start with the humble button?
March 4th 2010
Write while the heat is in you.
Henry David Thoreau
I speak from experience when I say to you how important this quotation is, and I'm betting you've felt a frisson (or a shudder!) of recognition when you read these few simple words. While I often give advice on finding ideas and getting stories started, I have to say the hardest thing in the world is to keep going, to keep plugging away at your work until it is complete. Beginnings are wonderful, buzzy, exciting things - the danger with them is that you don't see beyond them, or that you do that fatal thing: you TALK. Don't, don't, don't talk your enthusiasm out of your system. Don't breathlessly collar anyone who'll listen and tell them plot details and rejoice at how promising this new story is - if you're not careful, a stray word of doubt from somebody you're talking to will undermine your confidence in the enterprise. Plus, when you've told the tenth person all about your new book, you'll quite suddenly find you're bored. All the buzz has turned to fizzle and splat. You've talked yourself out of love with the thing. The white heat of inspiration has turned a leaden, chilled grey. You've lost it. So, if a good idea strikes you, don't hang about. Don't wait for conditions to be perfect - they never will be. Write it! Write it NOW!
February 19th 2010
Whether you think you can or you think you can't, you're probably right.
Henry Ford
Now I'm not one of these people who believes that the universe is some cosmic pizza delivery service: wishing doesn't make things happen. Wishing helps, but doing is more constructive. I start to get a bit leery when words like 'abundance', 'manifesting' and 'authentic' are bandied about. (I'm a Northern Scot, remember). However, I do think that attitude of mind is important and that while the universe might not be listening all that closely to your wishes and beliefs, you are. You do need to brainwash yourself in a positive way, you do need to reiterate self-belief, but not in an airy-fairy or egotistical manner. It's not enough to be an X Factor auditionee, where to say 'I want it so bad. This means the world to me!' seems to be justification enough to be put forward to the next stage. Yes, say you want it. Yes, say it means the world to you. Then do something about it - and that means the grind, not the glamour; the endless training and polishing, the refusal to be satisfied, the refusal to settle for second best. What you think of yourself, as Henry says, can be a self-fulfilling prophecy. So, be idealistic: think that you can. Be realistic: think there's always something more you can do to improve your work. Don't be defeatist - because if you give up you'll never know if you had it in you to be better, to get there.
February 4th 2010
You go to bed every night thinking that you've written the most brilliant passage ever done which somehow the next day you realize is sheer drivel.
Tom Wolfe
I don't know about you but I am often an early-hours-of-the-morning writer. We all seek times of day when distractions are negligible and we can tap into that special state of mind where ideas flow and you are transported into the world of your characters. You finish at some Godawful hour, creep off to bed, tired yet elevated, knowing you're going to pay for this in the morning and will be very snappy with your loved ones. Never mind: you've written some immortal prose and all is very well indeed. Post-creative adrenalin takes a while to ebb ... you sink into sleep. In the morning, you can't wait to re-read what you wrote. You anticipate the pride of good work done. However, in the heart-sinkingly cold light of day, the words on the page have somehow transmuted themselves into something ordinary, cliched, plodding, not what you meant at all. Damn. Damn and damn. Nothing for it but to try again and try harder. Then again, there are some mornings when you reread your own words and guess what? It is immortal! It is brilliant! You did it! And the feeling, the rush, of having captured exactly what you wanted to say, of being lifted by your own powers of expression, of being hooked by your own storyline - that's worth any number of grey, bland, disappointing mornings.
January 15th 2010
You think you want space and order, but sometimes pressure and disorder is more fruitful.
Nicci Gerrard
I've selected this quote to rev myself up as much as anybody else. Christmas was busy - but then Christmases always are. The New Year has so far been distracting and frustrating and I've found it hard to focus my mind. All writers dream of being left sufficiently alone to work - this may not mean literally being left alone but mentally finding the space to think, to daydream, to brew the elements of story. However, to counterbalance this, there is the old adage that if you want something done you should give it to a busy person. There's something to be said on both counts: I've had a busy and productive few months and am immensely proud of setting up fictionfire. I'm looking forward to running my next courses in May. Yet I've lost sight of my own projects and need to find a way to be both pressurised and calm, both disordered and structured. Too much leisure and you drift, you're a lotos-eater. Too much pressure and you're frazzled, in a panic, mentally drained. All of us wish to achieve balance and through that a route to our own creative productivity. As 2010 gets going I wish you all a very happy and fulfilling writing year.
December 18th 2009
The longer the writing project, the deeper and more debilitating the page fright ... The mistake, I think, is to strive to banish doubt, to see it as the enemy. Just as courage has no meaning without fear, faith has no meaning without doubt. They're the yin and yang of all aspiration.
Dennis Palumbo
Yes, I know, I know I've been remiss in posting my Quote of the Week. Christmas. Preparations for. I rest my case. To reward you for your patience, here's one of my favourite quotes, which sums up the paradox of creativity. Creative types are the most self-critical and insecure of people: one compliment, and we're on cloud nine, raring to write more, achieve more, feeling we've found our place in life. One criticism and we want to crawl into a hole, we want to give it up for ever, this excruciating need to be read and understood. The trouble is that we identify self with work. When you tackle a novel, it's hard to believe you can see it through in the first place, praise or no praise. Listen to Dennis. Believe. See doubt as part of the creative process. You will get there.
December 3rd 2009
To plot means to navigate through the dangerous terrain of story and when confronted by a dozen branching possibilities to choose the correct path. Plot is the writer's choice of events and their design in time.
Robert McKee
I used this quotation in my recent course on plot - which is an area many writers feel uncertain about or daunted by. When tackling a novel it is easy to feel overwhelmed by choice and to fear losing one's grip on all the elements of the story. Plotting does involve choice - and sometimes you'll make the wrong choice and have to back-track. Nothing is irrevocable. Nothing is set in stone. If you went down the wrong path, no big deal - retrace your steps and try again. It's all a learning process. I love McKee's second sentence here: you choose the events and you design them - which is a structural metaphor - and you place them in time - and here we have the two important aspects of plot. Plot is your structure, your shape, your framework. It holds the story up. Plot is also movement - it's a road, a route, a direction. Your reader is led down the road with a destination and you, the writer, are holding their hand. (The question is, who's holding yours ....?)
November 26th 2009
It is usual that the moment you write for publication - I mean one of course - one stiffens in exactly the same way one does when one is being photographed.
John Steinbeck
Quote of the week is a little late this week, because I've been so caught with preparing and running my courses. I've chosen Steinbeck's comment because we all of us have to try to balance the demands of writing what is right for us, with the demands of seeking a readership through publication. It's a difficult balance to strike. I have always felt it important that writers should be market-aware and should show flexibility and a willingness to adapt. We want to get our work out there, don't we? At the same time it is crucial not to become a total market-whore turning literary tricks at the cost of the soul. You may have to draw a line in the sand: you may have to say, 'I don't care if this is never published, this is what I wanted to write and this is how I wanted to write it and to mine own self I have been true.'
November 16th 2009
We should write because writing yields us a body of work, a felt path through the world we live in.
Julia Cameron
There are many reasons for writing and here in Julia's quotation there seem to be two: first that as your written output builds up, you have the satisfaction of creating your 'body of work'. You may not be Dickens with umpteen doorstop-novels or Shakespeare with over thirty plays, but as the years pass you create poems, stories, a novel or two - and whether they ever see the public light of day or not, it is important to feel proud of this. These are words strung in an order that is your order, and these are works of art which would have no existence at all were it not for you. Secondly, we have the notion of the 'felt path' - writing for many people is a way of making sense of things. You grope towards meaning by putting thought and experience into words - this too can be extraordinarily satisfying. Writing gives us pattern, structure, significance, all of which are comforting in an arbitrary world.
November 7th 2009
Fiction is the art of middle age, because you need an accumulation of people.
Pat Barker
We live in a youth-obsessed culture and increasingly writers have to worry about whether they look good enough for the book-jacket photo! Certainly there have always been writers of precocious talent who seem to hit the ground running in their teens or early twenties. Good for them. The rest of us worry that we'll be too over the hill for some young hip publisher to take us on. I don't deny that there's ageism in publishing, as there is everywhere. But if you're past the first flush of youth, don't despair. First of all, writers are still taken on when they're middle-aged or older - last year a chap who was in his nineties landed a publishing deal. It's never too late, if you're good enough. Secondly, your accumulation of years gives you an accumulation of experience and (possibly) wisdom, a maturity, a range: quite simply, you have something worth writing about. You've lived a life, for good or ill, and you're not limited to young love, adolescent angst, immature posturing. So speak up for yourself - you have something to say!
November 1st 2009
My ambition was just to sustain myself through writing so I wouldn't have to do other jobs.
Nick Hornby
At school and university I often used to envy those who seemed happy to have careers counselling sessions that advised them to go into retail management, accountancy, the law and so on - in my case, because I studied English, teaching and librarianship were always wheeled out as the perfect options for me. The truth was, though, that the prospect of a life being owned by an institution or company filled me with horror. The nine to five, the structured career, the having to be in a certain place at a certain time, the probability of having to kowtow to people for whom I had no respect, the horrible proportions of working hours to free time - all this filled me with revulsion. I wanted to write. I wanted autonomy. Do you recognise any of this? When writers aim to make money, they're usually not after diamonds and yachts - they're after what money can give them: time and freedom. Time and freedom are catalysts for creativity.
October 21st 2009
A borrowed style is a bad style.
Francois Mauriac
It seems to me that fictionfire is shaping up to be not only about creativity but about confidence - and one of the things that will give you confidence as a writer is to find your own voice. However, that hoary well-used phrase can all too often strike the fear of God into the new writer. Where is this 'voice' to be found? How do you know when you've found it? Well, you don't so much find it as it finds you - it sneaks up on you. If you practise writing - and that may well mean trying out other writer's voices and styles to see if they suit - you will gradually come to realise that you have developed your own particular cadences and choices of vocabulary, complexity or simplicity of sentences and that they have become recognisably 'you'. Just like you need to kiss a lot of frogs to find your prince, so you may have to try a variety of styles and approaches before you feel at ease within your writing skin. Keep experimenting - keep trying to be original. Some day your prince will come.
October 14th 2009
There is no story so old that something new cannot be said about it.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
This is a reassuring one, don't you think? Writers become so anxious about being original, having something new to say - but really there's nothing new under the sun. As the stand-up comedian Frank Carson used to say, 'It's the way you tell 'em.' You may not believe it but you do have your own voice and your voice will become clearer the more you write. You can tell a tale of revenge, of growing-up, of star-crossed lovers - but only you can tell it in your own particular way, bringing your own perceptions, images and prose rhythms to it.
October 7th 2009
To write any novel requires a suspension of lethargy.
Dorothy Dunnett
I chose this quotation because it's about an effort of will - an effort you have to make if you're ever to stop talking and start doing. It is, after all, so much easier, isn't it, to dream and talk and plan? I'm brilliant at all three, always have been! If you are restless but uncertain, poised on the brink, I do urge you to take the plunge. Don't at this stage think about earning loads of dosh, becoming famous - just think about your own relationship with your writing, with yourself. The first stage is to make a commitment to your writing, because you need to find out whether you can write one page, ten pages, fifty, a hundred, a whole book. You put one word down after another, again and again and again. One of the Deadly Sins of medieval religion was Accidie - it's a lethargy, a giving-in. It's an easy sin to succumb to. Take hold of that slothfulness and give it a good shake. Write a page. Then tomorrow or next weekend, shake it again. Write another page. If you win enough of these battles against doubt and passivity, you'll win the war.
September 29th 2009
O! for a Muse of fire, that would ascend
The brightest heaven of invention.
Shakespeare, Henry V
This is my first Quote of the Week and an unashamedly literary one at that! It's also idealistic, aspirational: let's all call on our inspiration and trust in it to raise us to heights of achievement we never expected to reach. On the good days, when the Muse is indeed with you, anything seems possible. On the bad days, remember that your Muse of fire was with you before - she may have popped down the shops or gone off on a more lengthy sabbatical - but she'll be back. I promise you. Give her a call.