sofía’s Reviews > On Teaching and Writing Fiction > Status Update
sofía
is on page 97 of 144
The point is, our fiction—what we write and what we read—is likely to be as frivolous or as serious as our lives are. If we never examine our lives, we are not likely to get much our of fiction that makes such examination its function.
— Jul 07, 2020 05:06PM
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sofía’s Previous Updates
sofía
is on page 121 of 144
What the storytelling impulse adds to experience is at least the illusion that one is in control, and providing direction.
— Jul 07, 2020 05:11PM
sofía
is on page 118 of 144
At least when one is both the patient and the healer, healing comes about not through mere ventilation but through conversion & creation. Order has been imposed on the chaos of experience, sensation, and memory, and it is the order that heals. It is also the order that makes the converted experience accessible to readers.
— Jul 07, 2020 05:09PM
sofía
is on page 94 of 144
few rules of thumb, some of them repetitions:
1. Start in the middle of things; begin in motion.
2. Stay in motion by not letting the [exposition] intrude; keep the [exposition] feeding into the scene in hints & driblets...
3. Never explain too much; a reader is offended if he cannot participate & use his mind and imagination, & a story loses much of its suspense the moment everything is explained.
— Jul 07, 2020 05:02PM
1. Start in the middle of things; begin in motion.
2. Stay in motion by not letting the [exposition] intrude; keep the [exposition] feeding into the scene in hints & driblets...
3. Never explain too much; a reader is offended if he cannot participate & use his mind and imagination, & a story loses much of its suspense the moment everything is explained.
sofía
is on page 93 of 144
A scene must persuade us in all its aspects, which means that the characters must be credible & consistent; that the dialog must approximate real talk without being cluttered by real talk's monotony, fatuousness, & repetition; that the action must move in a direct line, without wanderings or irrelevancies, & that an internal logic must hold the scene together, beginning, middle & end...
— Jul 07, 2020 04:53PM
sofía
is on page 88 of 144
The fact is that in nothing so much as our literary criticism do the forces of fashion & stereotype take over. In spite of (or is it because of?) the fact that the present reigning critics are ostentatiously polymathic and affect a world-tone, we have been getting essentially one kind of literature, one kind of moral & aesthetic stance, or else one kind of literature has been getting all the critical notice.
— Jul 07, 2020 04:46PM
sofía
is on page 80 of 144
Words are not obscene: Naming things is a legitimate verbal act... Under the right circumstances, any word is proper... The sin is not the use of an “obscene” word; it is the use of a loaded word in the wrong place or in the wrong quantity. It is the sin of false emphasis, which is not a moral but literary lapse related to sentimentality.
— Jul 07, 2020 04:42PM
sofía
is on page 75 of 144
Unless it is being dramatised or read aloud over the radio, fiction is one of the private [arts]. The audience has nothing to do with its making or with the slant it takes... You write to satisfy yourself & the inevitabilities of the situation you have started in motion. You write under a compulsion, it is true, but it is the compulsion of your situation... [but always] in the remote awareness of a listener...
— Jul 07, 2020 04:40PM
sofía
is on page 70 of 144
For one thing, you never took writing to mean self-expression, which means self-indulgence. You understood from the beginning that writing is done with words & sentences, & you spent hundreds of hours educating your ear, writing & rewriting & rewriting... By submitting to language, you submitted to other disciplines, you learned distance & detachment, you learned how to avoid muddying a story with yourself.
— Jul 07, 2020 04:35PM
sofía
is on page 66 of 144
After all, the language itself is an inheritance, a shared wealth. It may be played with, stretched, forced, bent; but I, as a writer or teacher, must never assume that it is mine. It is ours, the living core, as well as the instrument, of the culture I derive from, resist, challenge, and—ultimately—serve.
— Jul 07, 2020 03:47PM
sofía
is on page 66 of 144
Writing is a social act, an act of communication both intellectual and emotional. It is also, at its best, an act of affirmation—a way of joining the human race and a human culture. And that means a writer must have a clear conception not only of the self, but of the society.
— Jul 07, 2020 03:47PM
