Ulf’s Comments (group member since Jan 11, 2019)

Ulf’s comments from the Elements of Fiction group.

Intention:

(To survey other elements and author quotes, visit the Elements of Fiction home page)

“As a great French stylist has said: ‘The fundamental rule of style is to keep solely in view the thought one wants to convey.’ And he added ironically: ‘One must therefore have a thought to start with.’” Jacques Barzun

“One starts writing, not with a well-shaped thought, trimmed and polished, but with an intent.” Jacques Barzun

“The story does indeed take on a life of its own, asserting its own verities in a fashion which is (however paradoxical it may seem) separate from, though generated by, the intentions of the writer.” Madison Smartt Bell

“Writing is related to character. If your values are sound, your writing will be sound. It all begins with intention. Figure out what you want to do and how you want to do it, and work your way with humanity and integrity.” William Zinsser

“You may ask what will set the caldron of ideas bubbling. Wanting to tell is the answer.” Jacques Barzun

“George Orwell pointed out years ago that bad writing was often a sign of political deceit. Today it is clearly a sign of unlovely moral traits as well—vanity, pretentiousness, pedantry, complacency about one’s ignorance, disrespect toward the listener, and a curious mixture of slavish imitation and desire to appear original.” Jacques Barzun

“The intention of the pseudo-technical [word] is to impress with modernity and seriousness.” Jacques Barzun

“Mean what you write.” Ulf Wolf

“What’s the difference between the genuine and the perfectly faked? The reader can tell.” Ulf Wolf

“The only end of writing is to enable readers to better enjoy life or better . . . endure it.” Samuel Johnson

“A good writer always works at the impossible.” John Steinbeck

“If we ask what is the literary impulse par excellence we are, I think, bound to say that it is a desire to pull together one’s conscious self and project it into some tangible constructed thing made up of words and ideas.” Jacques Barzun

“It is certain my conviction gains infinitely at the moment another soul will believe in it.” Novalis

“Sometimes in a man or a woman awareness takes place—not very often and always inexplainable. There are no words for it because there is no one ever to tell. This is a secret not kept a secret, but locked in wordlessness. The craft of writing is the clumsy attempt to find symbols for the wordlessness. In utter loneliness the writer tries to explain the inexplainable.” John Steinbeck

(c) Wolfstuff

http://rowansongs.com/eof-intention

Imagination:

(To survey other elements and author quotes, visit the Elements of Fiction home page)

“What the imagination seizes as beauty must be truth.” Denise Levertov

“The soul, by an instinct stronger than reason, ever associates beauty with truth.” Henry Theodore Tuckerman

“I’m am sure of nothing but the holiness of the heart’s affection and the truth of the imagination.” John Keats

“The mistress of the world… This superb power, this enemy of reason.” Blaise Pascal

“Everything one invents is true.” Gustave Flaubert

“It is a complete fallacy to believe you must always experience what you put into a book, what matters is whether you can imagine it or not; there is no automatic connection between experience and imaginative writing.” Salman Rushdie

“The imagination disposes all things; it is the imagination that creates beauty, justice and happiness.” Blaise Pascal

“Poetic imagination is the only clue to reality.” Ernst Cassirer

“The imagination is the only genius.” Wallace Stevens

“Only in men’s imagination does every truth find an effective and undeniable existence.” Joseph Conrad

“Imagination, not invention, is the supreme master of art as of life.” Joseph Conrad

“An imaginative and exact rendering of authentic memories may serve worthily that spirit of piety towards all things human which sanctions the conceptions of a writer of tales, and the emotions of the man reviewing his own experience.” Joseph Conrad

“The writer must summon out of nonexistence some character, some scene, and he must focus that imaginary scene in his mind until he sees it as vividly as, in another state, he would see the typewriter and cluttered desk in front of him, or the last year’s calendar on the wall. But at times—for most of us, all to occasionally—something happens, a demon takes over, or nightmare swings in, and the imaginary becomes real.” John Gardner

“I speak of the poet because we think of him as the orator of the imagination.” Wallace Stevens

“The fact seems to be that I can think almost anything, which means I suppose that I can be almost anything.” John Steinbeck

“Out of the artist’s imagination, as out of nature’s inexhaustible well, pours one thing after another. The artist composes, writes or paints just as he dreams, seizing whatever swims close to his net.” John Gardner

“The novelist’s imagination has a power of its own. It does not merely invent, it perceives. It intensifies, therefore it gives power, extra importance, greater truth, and greater inner reality to what well may be ordinary and everyday things.” Elizabeth Bowen

“Before you begin to write a sentence, imagine the scene you want to paint with your words. Imagine that you are the character and feel what the character feels. Smell what the character smells, and hear with that character’s ears. For an instant, before you begin to write, see and feel what you want the reader to see and feel.” Othello Bach

“Poetic value is an intrinsic value. It is not the value of knowledge. It is not the value of faith. It is the value of the imagination.” Wallace Stevens

“The truth seems to be that we live in concepts of the imagination before the reason has established them. If this is true, then reason is simply the methodizer of the imagination.” Wallace Stevens

“In literature, you know only what you imagine.” Carlos Fuentes

“You put yourself apart from yourself, and you enter the imaginary world.” Andrew Lytle

“The realm where the narrative you are working with becomes true and alive for you.” Madison Smartt Bell

“The composition of fiction can, at least theoretically, be broken into two stages. First, and most important, comes imagination. Next is rendering. Imagination is no more or less than a highly structured form of daydreaming. Daydreaming is fun, a form of play. Once the people, the places, the events you are imagining become fully present to your senses, then it’s time for rendering. . . . to express your vision in language.” Madison Smartt Bell

“I do find something distressingly amoral in the very nature of film and TV—possibly because the photographic image denies the spectator virtually all use of his own imaginative powers. Whereas reading requires a constant use of the reader’s imagination.” John Fowles

“Imagination is the light by which we see.” Flannery O’Connor

“The real man, the imagination.” Blake

“The artist’s imagination, or the world it builds, is the laboratory of the unexperienced, both the heroic and the unspeakable.” John Gardner

“It [imagination] is the one thing beside honesty that a good writer must have. The more he learns from experience the more truly he can imagine. If he gets so he can imagine truly enough people will think the things he relates all really happened and that he is just reporting.” Ernest Hemingway

“There is something in the nature of nature, in its presentness, its seeming transience, its creative ferment and hidden potential, that corresponds very closely with the wild, or green man, in our psyches.” John Fowles

“The writer’s sole authority is his imagination. He works out in his imagination what would happen and why, acting out every part himself, making his characters say what he would say himself if he were a young second-generation Italian, then an old Irish policeman, and so on. When the writer accepts unquestioningly someone else’s formulation of how and why people behave, he is not thinking but dramatizing some other man’s theory: that of Freud, Adler, Laing, or whomever. Needless to say, one may make some theory of motivation one’s premise—an idea to be tested. But the final judgment must come from the writer’s imagination.” John Gardner

“You have to distinguish two kinds of writing: most important is first-draft writing, which to an extraordinary degree is an intuitive thing—you never quite know when you sit down whether it’s going to come or not, and you get all kinds of good ideas from nowhere. They just come between one line and the next.” John Fowles

“A strong imagination makes characters do what they would do in real life. A subtler work of the imagination—a subtler way in which the writing of fiction is a morally serious mode of thought—is symbolic association.” John Gardner

“Romantic theory: the imagination, wellspring of compassion, is an innate faculty but one which requires exercise and training.” John Gardner

“The bad writer may not intend to manipulate; he simply does not know what his characters would do because he has not been watching them closely enough in his mind’s eye—has not been catching the subtle emotional signals that, for the more careful writer, show where the action must go next.” John Gardner

“The imagination sees with the eyes of the spirit; the maker, finished with his making, must then see what he has done, like the reader, with corporeal eyes.” Guy Davenport

“The intellect has withdrawn its watchers from the gates, and the ideas rush in pell-mell, and only then does [the creative mind] review and inspect the multitude.” Schiller

“Ridiculous little parakeet faced woman; but not quite sufficiently ridiculous. I kept wishing for superlatives; could not get the illusion to flap its wings.” Virginia Woolf

“I began the making up of scenes—unconsciously: saying phrases to myself; and so, for a week, I’ve sat here, staring at the typewriter and speaking aloud phrases of The Pargiters.” Virginia Woolf

“Elvira and George, or John, talking in her room. I’m still miles outside them, but I think I got into the right tone of voice this morning.” Virginia Woolf

“A novel, as we say, opens a new world to the imagination.” Percy Lubbock

“All literary and dramatic enjoyment, whether of nursery tales in childhood or of moving pictures later on or of ‘great literature,’ appears to involve to some degree the reader’s imaginative identification of himself with the roles portrayed and his projection of himself into the situations described in the story. (At what age does the capacity for imaginative identification of oneself with the roles portrayed in a story begin? The writer would suggest, on the basis of very limited observation, that it begins around the age of two or earlier. An interesting test case is to read the story of the Three Bears to a very small child to see when he begins to identify himself with Baby Bear.)” S.I. Hayakawa

“The first conception of the work needs intuition and imagination more than the craftsman’s toolbox, and so does the final consummation.” Madison Smartt Bell

“The landscape that opens before the critic is whole and single; it has passed through an imagination, it has shed its irrelevancy and is compact with its own meaning. Such is the world of the book.” Percy Lubbock

“Safety is a crime writers should never commit unless they are after tenure or praise.” Pat Conroy

“Don Quixote does not invite us into ‘reality’ but into an act of the imagination where all things are real.” Carlos Fuentes

“If the writing is any good, it struggles free of you, and the feeling of being inside it just as it moves away is so brief; a sensual visitation, the brush of His hand.” Jayne Anne Phillips

“Throughout time great writers have always been able to transpose themselves imaginatively into not just the racial other, but the sexual other and also into other historical periods.” Philip Gerard

“I think you will agree that the good lasting stuff comes out of one individual’s imagination and sensitivity to and comprehension of the suffering of Everyman, Anyman, not out of the memory of his own grief.” William Faulkner (in a letter to Richard Wright)

“The storyteller is deep inside everyone of us. The story-maker is always with us. Let us suppose our world is attacked by war, by the horrors that we all of us easily imagine. Let us suppose floods wash through our cities, the seas rise . . . but the storyteller will be there, for it is our imaginations which shape us, keep us, create us - for good and for ill. It is our stories that will recreate us, when we are torn, hurt, even destroyed. It is the storyteller, the dream-maker, the myth-maker, that is our phoenix, that represents us at our best, and at our most creative.” Doris Lessing

“[A]rt’s validity can only be tested by an imaginative act on the reader’s part.” John Gardner

http://rowansongs.com/eof-imagination

Experience:

(To survey other elements and author quotes, visit the Elements of Fiction home page)

“Write about what you know and write truly.” Ernest Hemingway

“When the soul wishes to experience something she throws an image of the experience before her and enters into her own image.” Meister Eckhart

“The writer’s business is to contemplate experience, not to be merged in it.” Flannery O’Connor

“After all, we do not write to recapture an experience; we write to come as close to it as we can.” Norman Mailer

“The good creative artist is a man who has learned to drop at will almost anywhere he wishes in his experience, recapturing an infinite variety of impressions from the past—though he may have no clear idea of where in his past they come from. “ John Gardner

“The fact is that anybody who has survived his childhood has enough information about life to last him the rest of his days. If you can’t make something out of a little experience, you probably won’t be able to make it out of a lot.” Flannery O’Connor

“First of all, read and think. All good books are distilled experience. Stay away from creative writing courses.” John Fowles

“—the individual experiencer, the ‘green man’ hidden in the leaves of his or her unique and once-only being.” John Fowles

“I read some stories at one of the colleges not long ago—all by Southerners—but with the exception of one story, they might have all originated in some synthetic place that could have been anywhere or nowhere. These stories hadn’t been influenced by the outside world at all, only by television. It was a grim view of the future.” Flannery O’Connor

“The medium of literary art is not language but language plus the writer’s experience and imagination and, above all, the whole of the literary tradition he knows.” John Gardner

“The medium of any given art is everything that has ever been done in it, or everything the artist is aware of in his tradition. The medium for the first sculptor may have been mud, but the second sculptor worked with a more complex substance: mud and his experience of the first sculptor’s work.” John Gardner

“The articulation which satisfies an artist is directly analogous to that which satisfies a preacher: an interpretation of the experience of his own time and place, summed up in the person of the artist or preacher, developed through the medium of the whole tradition of, in one case, art, and in the other case, doctrine.” John Gardner

“To speak of ‘tradition and individual talent’ is to speak misleadingly, though not incorrectly. We would do better to speak of the convergence of tradition and the individual artist’s moment.” John Gardner

“I read a novel for the purpose of seeing the kind of people I would want to see in real life and living through the kind of experience I would want to live through.” Ayn Rand

“Good writing is true writing. If a man is making a story up it will be true in proportion to the amount of knowledge of life that he has and how conscientious he is; so that when he makes something up it is as it would truly be.” Ernest Hemingway

“I sincerely believe the best thing for a young writer to do is to get the hell off the campus and go and work it out on his own.” John Fowles

“Every writer has to work within the frame of his own material. For the beginning writer, it is important to select scenes that he can handle. If yours is an historical noveltry not to have a log cabin raising unless you know how they were actually built. Do not attempt a scene of madness unless you know what you are talking about.” William Sloane

“The first requirement of a writer is that he know something. The second requirement is not remarkably different. The wise writer writes about what he knows and never about what he knows nothing.” William Sloane

“The infinity of differences in our feelings towards all the many experiences that we undergo are too subtle to be reported; they must be expressed. And we express them by the complicated manipulation of tones of voice, of rhythms, of connotations, of affective facts, of metaphors, of allusions, of every affective device of language at our command.” S.I. Hayakawa

“Human life . . . is ‘lived’ at more than one level; we inhabit both the extensional world and the world of words (and other symbols). ‘Living other people’s lives in books’ means, as we shall use the expression here, symbolic experience—sometimes called ‘vicarious experience.’” S.I. Hayakawa

“In the enjoyment and contemplation of a work of literary or dramatic art—a novel, a play, a moving picture—we find our deepest enjoyment when the leading characters in the story to some degree symbolize ourselves. . . . As we identify ourselves with the people in the story, the dramatist or the novelist puts us through organized sequences of symbolic experiences.” S.I. Hayakawa

“The differences between actual and symbolic experiences are great—one is not scarred by watching a moving-picture battle, nor is one nourished by watching people in a play having dinner. Furthermore, actual experiences come to us in highly disorganized fashion: meals, arguments with the landlady, visits to the doctor about one’s fallen arches, and so on, interrupt the splendid course of romance. The novelist, however, abstracts only the events relevant to his story and then organizes them into a meaningful sequence.” S.I. Hayakawa

“If an author has adequately dealt with tensions that people under all times and conditions appear to experience, do we not call his writings ‘universal’ and ‘undying’?” S.I. Hayakawa

“To symbolize adequately and then to order into a coherent whole one’s experiences constitute an integrative act. The great novelist or dramatist or poet is one who has successfully integrated and made coherent vast areas of human experience. Literary greatness requires, therefore, great extensional awareness of the range of human experience as well as great powers of ordering that experience meaningfully. This is why he discipline of the creative artist is endless: there is always more to learn, both about human experience (which is the material to be ordered) and about the techniques of his craft (which are the means of ordering).” S.I. Hayakawa

“No other Western writer has ever known India as Kipling knew it, and it is this knowledge of place, and procedure, and detail that gives his stories their undeniable authority.” Salman Rushdie

http://rowansongs.com/eof-experience

Research:

(To survey other elements and author quotes, visit the Elements of Fiction home page)

“The more I hung out doing research, the more the story changed, the more specific and the more intimate it became, and also the more daunting and endless.” Richard Price

“Research encompasses everything the writer does, accidentally or deliberately, randomly or systematically, to put him in direct touch with his subject.” Philip Gerard

“If you’re going after big ideas, universal themes, you have to know—really know—what you’re writing about. The best books of this type—nonfiction and fiction—are firmly grounded in research.” Philip Gerard

“The greatest part of a writer’s time is spent reading in order to write. A man will turn over half a library in order to write.” Samuel Johnson

“I’ve somewhat delayed my start [of a new book] because I’ve got a couple of years’ reading to do.” Salman Rushdie

“In order to get on with my novel I need to see a part of the region that hasn’t already been dealt with by everyone else, and where there are real local people in their own surroundings: peasants, fishermen, a genuine village among the rocks. . . . I’d like to see their faces, their clothes, their houses, and the landscapes they live in. That’s enough for my purposes; I only need them as props. I don’t really mean to describe things; I just need to see them, so as not to get the lighting wrong.” George Sand

“I can’t possible overstate the importance of good research. Everyone goes through life dropping crumbs. If you can recognize the crumbs you can trace a path. For every crime there is a motive. For every motive there is a passion. The art of research is the ability to look at the details and see the passion.” Jake Kasdan

“In the first draft I don’t do any research at all. I write little things like check up or develop in the margin, because I think the skeleton of a novel must be the narrative—I call it the ‘spine.’ I let the spine dominate the whole first draft. That means the story must keep going, so I often leave out descriptions of clothes or the mood of a scene or other non-narrative elements, and deal with them later on.” John Fowles

“The sort of research that grocers call useless.” George Sand

“I was in Paris for three days, which I spent doing research and errands for my book.” Gustave Flaubert

“As a writer, my motto has always been don’t confuse me with the facts’ . . . I want to know just enough so I can lie colorfully.” Stephen King

“Whatever success I have had has been through writing what I know about.” Ernest Hemingway

“Knowledge is what makes the underwater part of the iceberg.” Ernest Hemingway

“If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them.” Ernest Hemingway

“I spent a week in Paris verifying boring details.” Gustave Flaubert

“A vital aspect of the fiction-writing process, and most surely of all creative writing processes, is the matter of density. By density I mean richness, substance. It is the core of knowing your materials.” William Sloane

“Do research. I think it’s very important. The reader knows when there’s something authentic. You can’t fake it.” Sidney Sheldon

“Research is back story, and the key work in back story is back. . . . What I’m looking for is nothing but a touch of verisimilitude, like the handful of spices you chuck into a good spaghetti sauce to really finish her off. That sense of reality is important in any work of fiction, but I think it is particularly important in a story dealing with the abnormal or paranormal.” Stephen King

“When you step away from the ‘write what you know’ rule, research becomes inevitable, and it can add a lot to your story. Just don’t end up with the tail wagging the dog; remember that you are writing a novel, not a research paper. The story always comes first.” Stephen King

“I did a year’s research for the second section of a novel and ended up using very little. This is what the film business aptly calls ‘back story,’ without knowledge of which it is difficult to proceed. If a woman character is thirty-seven, you still have to figure out the nature of her personality when she was a child, even if you have no intention of using that.” Jim Harrison

“You research it any way you have to in order to know—really know—its truth.” Philip Gerard

“While memory and reflection always play important roles in writing, research focuses the writer outside himself, beyond personal perspective, toward the facts of the world. In this way it opens up the subject. This tension between the personal voice and a larger context—social, historical, scientific, moral—drives the classic books in our literature.” Philip Gerard

“You want knowledge against which to test your personal intuition.” Philip Gerard

“One important function of research is to inspire you with humility about your subject, reminding you that you can get only so close and no closer to perfect understanding, forcing your imagination therefore to work harder, forcing you to deeper research. Keeping you honest.” Philip Gerard

“You must inspire the reader with the confidence that you know the fascinating inside story, that you’re not just faking it. Not just that you can recite the facts—but that you feel the truth of the subject, physically, emotionally, spiritually. That it has somehow entered you, changed you. It’s not a superficial knowledge, the kind that wins trivia tests. It’s something deeper, something about which you finally have come to a beginning of understanding. Even in a novel, your world has to be so convincingly grounded in the facts and feeling of the real world that the reader doesn’t doubt it for an instance.” Philip Gerard

“Research brings knowledge to your writing, where it mingles with personal experience, and intellectual and aesthetic judgment to create an authentic voice.” Philip Gerard

“Good research can add knowledge, power, and authenticity to the writing, helping readers understand and more fully participate in the world the writer is creating.” Philip Gerard

“If you can’t afford to do the essential research, if you don’t have time to learn what you need to learn, the book will not happen.” Philip Gerard

“There’s no one right way; there’s only the way that’s right for your subject.” Philip Gerard

“As a practical matter, how can I capture this elusive subject? That’s every writer’s essential question, because all subjects worth writing about are elusive in some important way.” Philip Gerard

“Research, like writing, is a craft, and after reasonable preparation, the only way to learn how to do it well is to do it.” Philip Gerard

“During the research phase, the clock is always ticking toward the moment when you will begin to write, but you can’t rush. There are no shortcuts.” Philip Gerard

“The Internet, including the World Wide Web, with all its attendant databases and home pages and hotlinks, can serve a researchers well, but it can only take you so far. It’s a great well of information, bogus as well as reliable, but it is no substitute for the real thing, for being there, for the thing itself. The great books seem to be earned, not always through physical danger, but through a deep experience with the subject. And some courage to put yourself on the line.” Philip Gerard

“The more complex the events of your book, the more time it encompasses, the more useful the chronology is likely to prove. Once you have it straight, you have your Bible: Here’s what happened and in what order. It liberates you not to have to create a strict chronology in the work itself. You may choose to fragment the narrative, or to transpose the ending with the beginning, or to simply move around thematically rather than in chronological order. Once you have the chronology on your writing desk—and in your head—you’ll never get lost, and you have a better chance of not losing the reader, no matter how you skew time.” Philip Gerard

“Less can be more: By carefully selecting which parts of your research to include, you can create fuller, more lasting impressions of them. They won’t be summarized, glossed over, lost in the thicket of other less compelling parts.” Philip Gerard

“Don’t cheat. You will always regret it later. Always. No exceptions.” Philip Gerard

http://rowansongs.com/eof-research

Observation:

(To survey other elements and author quotes, visit the Elements of Fiction home page)

"In a way, nobody sees a flower, really, it is so small, we haven’t the time—and to see takes time, like to have a friend takes time.” Georgia O’Keeffe

“Observation and the inner truth of that observation as he perceives it, the two being tested one against the other: to him [the writer] this is what the writing of a novel is.” Eudora Welty

“The fiction writer is an observer, first, last, and always.” Flannery O’Connor

“To gaze is to think.” Salvador Dalí

“The eye with which I see God is the same eye with which God sees me.” Meister Eckhart

“The greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world is to see something and tell what he saw in a plain way. Hundreds of people can talk for one who can think, and thousands can think for one who can see. To see clearly is poetry, prophecy, and religion all in one.” John Ruskin

“There is a difference if we see something with a pencil in our hand or without one.” Paul Valéry

“The surest—also the quickest—way to awake the sense of wonder in ourselves is to look intently, undeterred, at a single object. Suddenly, miraculously, it will reveal itself as something we have never seen before.” Cesare Pavese

“It is essential for a writer unceasingly to study men, and it is a fault in me that I find it often a very tedious business. It requires a great deal of patience.” W. Somerset Maugham

“Mark the greater from the lesser truth: namely the larger and more liberal idea of nature from the comparatively narrow and confined… that which addresses itself to the imagination from that which is solely addressed to the Eye.” J.M.W. Turner paraphrasing Sir Joshua Reynolds

“We lack trust in the present, this moment, this actual seeing, because our culture tells us to trust only the reported back, the publicly framed, the edited, the thing set in the clearly artistic or the clearly scientific angle of perspective. One of the deepest lessons we have to learn is that nature, of its nature, resists this. It waits to be seen otherwise, in its individual presentness and from our individual presentness.” John Fowles

“To be a writer and not a hack, you must clear your mind of cant and allow multitudinous messages to come to you from the souls of your fellowmen. They are the secret source of your abundant ideas. People do not know what they communicate; yet it is they whom you ‘read,’ consciously and unconsciously, and whom you interpret to themselves, in stories, poems, plays, or works of social and moral philosophy.” Jacques Barzun

“The novelist is required to open his eyes on the world around him and look. If what he sees is not highly edifying, he is still required to look. Then he is required to reproduce, with words, what he sees.” Flannery O’Connor

“I should notice everything—the phrase for it coming the moment after and fitting like a glove.” Virginia Woolf

“Your characterizations will never be better than your power of observation.” Ayn Rand

“That close scrutiny is one among many elements that make up the practice of fiction; let it serve as a clue to the value of authentic practice—and to the waste and harm in fictional malpractice.” John Gardner

“[A] writer is forced from all sides to make his gaze extend beyond the surface, beyond mere problems, until it touches that realm which is the concern of prophets and poets.” Flannery O’Connor

“By being a constant, conscious valuer of people, you gather the material from which you will draw your future characterizations.” Ayn Rand

“What conveys honesty? What conveys dishonesty? You can observe these characteristics only by their outward manifestations—by the words, actions, gestures, and subtler mannerisms of people.” Ayn Rand

“I see only what is outside and what sticks out a mile, such things as the sun that nobody has to uncover or be bright to see. When I first started to write, I was much worried over not being subtle but it don’t worry me any more.” Flannery O’Connor

“The eye sees what it has been given to see by concrete circumstances, and the imagination reproduces what, by some related gift, it is able to make live.” Flannery O’Connor

“For the writer of fiction, everything has its testing in the eye.” Flannery O’Connor

“Now learning to see is the basis for learning all the arts except music. I know a good many fiction writers who paint, not because they’re any good at it, but because it helps in their writing. It forces them to look at things. Fiction writing is very seldom a matter of saying things; it is a matter of showing things.” Flannery O’Connor

“In fiction we stand back, weigh things as we do not have to do in life; and the effect of great fiction is to temper real experience, modify prejudice, humanize.” John Gardner

“The true writer’s scrutiny of imagined scenes both feeds on and feeds his real-life experience: almost without knowing he’s doing it, the writer becomes an alert observer.” John Gardner

“We study people carefully for two main reasons: in order to understand them and fully experience our exchange with them, or in order to feel ourselves superior. The first purpose can contribute to art and is natural to art, since the soul of art is celebration and discovery through imitation.” John Gardner

“He must present, moment by moment, concrete images drawn from careful observation of how people behave, and he must render the connections between moments, the exact gestures, facial expressions, or turns of speech that, within any give scene, move human beings from emotion to emotion, from one instant in time to the next.” John Gardner

“Write as if you were a movie camera. Get exactly what is there. Getting it down precisely is all that is meant by ‘the accuracy of the writer’s eye.’” John Gardner

“Getting down what the writer really cares about—setting down what the writer himself notices, as opposed to what any fool might notice—is all that is meant by the originality of the writer’s eye.” John Gardner

“Both because the cogency of his story depends on it and because he has learned to take pride in getting his scenes exactly right, the good writer scrutinizes the imagined or remembered scene with full concentration. Though his plot seems to be rolling along beautifully and his characters seem to be behaving with authentic and surprising independence, as characters in good fiction always do, the writer is willing to stop writing for a minute or two, or even stop for a long while, to figure out precisely what some object or gesture looks like and hunt down exactly the right word to describe it.” John Gardner

“It may feel more classy to imitate James Joyce or Walter Percy than All in the Family; but every literary imitation lacks something we expect of good writing: the writer seeing with his own eyes.” John Gardner

“The noblest originality is not stylistic but visionary and intellectual; the writer’s accurate presentation of what he, himself, has seen, heard, thought, and felt.” John Gardner

“To fail to imitate people as they are, even in a fable which takes as its setting ancient Nubia or outer space, would reveal a lack of the true artist’s most noticeable characteristic: fascination with the feelings, gestures, obsessions, and phobias of the people of his own time and place. One cannot imagine a Dante, a Chaucer, a Shakespeare, or a Racine without characters drawn from scrutiny of real people.” John Gardner

“He [the artist] is one who can see in the country of the blind.” John Gardner

“The novelist must be characterized not by his function but by his vision, and we must remember that his vision has to be transmitted and that the limitations and blind spots of his audience will very definitely affect the way he is able to show what he sees. This is another thing which in these times increases the tendency toward the grotesque in fiction.” Flannery O’Connor

“The writer who emphasizes spiritual values is very likely to take the darkest view of all of what he sees in this country today. For him, the fact that we are the most powerful and the wealthiest nation in the world doesn’t mean a thing in any positive sense. The sharper the light of faith, the more glaring are apt to be the distortions the writer sees in the life around him.” Flannery O’Connor

“The kind of vision the fiction writer needs to have, or to develop, in order to increase the meaning of his story is called anagogical vision, and that is the kind of vision that is able to see different levels of reality in one image or one situation.” Flannery O’Connor

“Any discipline can help your writing: logic, mathematics, theology, and of course and particularly drawing. Anything that helps you see, anything that makes you look. The writer should never be ashamed of staring. There is nothing that doesn’t require his attention.” Flannery O’Connor

“There are two qualities that make fiction. One is the sense of mystery and the other is the sense of manners. You get the manners from the texture of existence that surrounds you.” Flannery O’Connor”

“A view taken in the light of the absolute will include a good deal more than one taken merely in the light provided by a house-to-house survey.” Flannery O’Connor

“Observing [a client] in his or her own element is usually very telling. Behavior is always more revealing than language. If you know what to look for.” Jake Kasdan

“There is that unique moment when one confronts something new and astonishment begins. Whatever it is, it looms brightly, its edges sharp, its details ravishing, in a hard clear light; just beholding it is a form of revelation.” Diane Ackerman

“So much of our life passes in a comfortable blur. Living on the senses requires an easily triggered sense of marvel, a little extra energy, and most people are lazy about life. Life is something that happens to them while they wait for death.” Diane Ackerman

“Be someone on whom nothing is lost.” Henry James

“Knowing the place for the first time is for me a repetitive process, not some sort of single climactic event. There are always knowings for the first time, on even the simplest or most familiar return . . . if one knows how to look for them.” John Fowles

“The hardest thing in the world to do is to write straight honest prose on human beings. First you have to know the subject; then you have to know how to write. Both take a lifetime to learn.” Ernest Hemingway

“Listen now. When people talk listen completely. Don’t be thinking what you’re going to say. Most people never listen. Nor do they observe.” Ernest Hemingway

“You should be able to go into a room and when you come out know everything that you saw there and not only that. If that room gave you any feeling you should know exactly what it was that gave you that feeling. Try that for practice.” Ernest Hemingway

“When you’re in town stand outside the theatre and see how the people differ in the way they get out of taxis or motor cars. There are a thousand ways to practice. And always think of other people.” Ernest Hemingway

“The writer, unlike his non-writing adult friend, has no predisposed outlook; he seldom observes deliberately. He sees what he did not intend to see; he remembers what does not seem wholly possible. Inattentive learner in the schoolroom of life, he keeps some faculty free to veer and wander. He is the roving eye.” Elizabeth Bowen

“I write to live, and I write to share. The Original Creator’s version seems random and fantastic, but there are enough consistencies, if you wait and watch for them, to give remarkable tales. You must wake up terribly to catch them, even though what you produce may be close to dream.” Barry Hannah

“Listen to your broccoli, and your broccoli will tell you how to eat it.” Mel Brooks

“What a strange life it is. Inspecting it for the purpose of setting it down on paper only illuminates its strangeness.” John Steinbeck

http://rowansongs.com/eof-observation

Interest:

(To survey other elements and author quotes, visit the Elements of Fiction home page)

“Nothing can be made to be of interest to the reader that was not first of vital concern to the writer.” John Gardner

“Wisdom begins in wonder.” Socrates

“You can’t fake interest in a subject.” Philip Gerard

“Books are about things which are outside books. If books are not about the world then they are not interesting to people, not even interesting to write, to me.” Salman Rushdie

“The great novels we get in the future are not going to be those that the public thinks it wants, or those that critics demand. They are going to be the kind of novels that interest the novelist.” Flannery O’Connor

“The novels that interest the novelist are those that have not already been written. They are those that put the greatest demand on him, that require him to operate at the maximum of his intelligence and his talents, and to be true to the particularities of his own vocation. The direction of many of us will be more toward poetry than toward the traditional novel.” Flannery O’Connor

“The child, almost any child, is born with the hope that the universe is somehow to be explained: it may be, the writer does not outlive that hope—here and there his eye passes, from clue to clue… Somewhere within the pattern, somewhere behind the words, a responsive, querying innocence stays intact.” Elizabeth Bowen

“Living is the trick. Writers who write interestingly tend to be men and women who keep themselves interested. That’s almost the whole point of becoming a writer.” William Zinsser

“People of every age will write better and with more enjoyment if they write about what they care about.” William Zinsser

“I’m struck by how often as a writer I say to myself, ‘That’s interesting.’ If you find yourself saying it, pay attention and follow your nose. Trust your curiosity to connect with the curiosity of your readers.” William Zinsser

“Ask yourself, therefore, what kind of conflicts and events you would find interesting. You will be surprised at how productive this is… Do not ask what kind of events would make the best propaganda, or what kind your potential audience might like—no, ask what you personally would like to see happen. That is the best springboard for interesting events.” Ayn Rand

“Writers always write best about what they most care about.” John Gardner

“The nobler the goal, the more interesting the story.” John Gardner

“I don’t think you should write something as long as a novel about anything that is not of the gravest concern to you and everybody else.” Flannery O’Connor

“A good story is literal in the same way that a child’s drawing is literal. When a child draws, he doesn’t intend to distort but to set down exactly what he sees, and as his gaze is direct, he sees the lines that create motion. Now the lines of motion that interest the writer are usually invisible. They are lines of spiritual motion.” Flannery O’Connor

“Experiment but for heaven’s sake don’t go writing exercises. You will never be interested in anything that is just an exercise and there is no reason you should. Don’t do anything that you are not interested in and that don’t have a promise of being whole.” Flannery O’Connor

“Anything we read for pleasure we read because it interests us.” John Gardner

“A powerful part of our interest as we read great literature is our sense that we’re ‘onto something.’ And part of our boredom when we read books in which the vision of life seems paltry minded is our sense that we are not.” John Gardner

“Stories beginning in character and conflict are bound to be more interesting than stories that do not.” John Gardner

“What chiefly interests us in fiction is characters in action.” Aristotle

“The only thing that can make a story exiting and hold a reader’s interest is some value at stake.” Ayn Rand

“I must note this odd symptom; a conviction that I shall go on, see it through, because it interests me to write it.” Virginia Woolf

“The novel of a classless and towerless world should be a better novel than the old novel. The novelist will have more interesting people to describe—people who have had a chance to develop their humour, their gifts, their tastes; real people, not people cramped and squashed into featureless masses by hedges.” Virginia Woolf

“They are not necessarily happy or successful, but there is a zest in their presence, an interest in their doings. They seem alive all over.” Virginia Woolf

“What happens, so far as I’m concerned, is that you have an idea, but it’s just one of many ideas. It may stay latent, a dry seed, for years. Then gradually it stirs, begins to obsess you slightly. One day it really obsesses you, and you’re in business… Or maybe it’s a certain interest in a particular field which then gives birth to a specific image, the thing that actually obsesses you.” John Fowles

“There are no uninteresting subjects, only uninteresting writers.” William Sloane

“It is impossible to teach anyone what to write. The content must come from within. The importance of this short sentence cannot be exaggerated. All effective writing is about something, and almost all of it above the level of soup can label, turns out to be about quite a lot of things fused or laced or linked together.” William Sloane

“Don’t worry about the words. I’ve been doing that since 1921. I always count them when I knock off and am drinking the first whiskey and soda. Guess I got in the habit writing dispatches. Used to send them from some places where they cost a dollar and a quarter a word and you had to make them awful interesting at that price or get fired.” Ernest Hemingway

“I’ve used writing to give myself an interesting life and a continuing education. If you write about subjects you think you would enjoy knowing about, your enjoyment will show in what you write. Learning is a tonic.” William Zinsser

“The novelist’s subject is not society, not the individual as a social unit, but the individual as he himself is, behind the social mask.” Elizabeth Bowen

“The novel is whatever novelists are doing at a given time. If we’re not doing the big social novel fifteen years from now, it’ll probably mean our sensibilities have changed in ways that make such work less compelling to us—we won’t stop because the market dried up. The writer leads, he doesn’t follow. The dynamic lives in the writer’s mind, not in the size of the audience. And if the social novel lives, but only barely, surviving in the cracks and ruts of the culture, maybe it will be taken more seriously, as an endangered spectacle. A reduced context but a more intense one.” Don DeLillo

“The precious particle… the stray suggestion, the wandering word, the vague echo, at a touch of which the novelist’s imagination winces as at the prick of some sharp point.” Henry James

“The two great foundations of art and science: curiosity and criticism.” John Steinbeck

“All novels are burdened with the need to make life more interesting than it is.” Wright Morris

“Evil conquering good is not so interesting as good conquering good.” George Bernard Shaw

“The only way a writer can satisfy his own curiosity is to write it.” Eudora Welty

“There was something in the story before him which kindled his interest and quickened his powers.” Virginia Woolf

http://rowansongs.com/eof-interest