Giving Characters Life

In literature, as in our dreams, death does not exist. Take, for example, the case of Anna Karenina. This book was written more than a hundred years ago but you don't say "the late Anna Karenina" or "the late Madame Bovary" or "the late Flaubert." They are alive. If the writer manages to imbue them with life, then they, together with their author, live forever. When people ask me, "Why do you write about a vanished world?" I answer, "Whether a hero is alive today and will be dead twenty years from now, or whether he died twenty years ago or two thousand years ago‑if the writer has given him life, he or she will be a living part of human conciousness.

from Conversations with Isaac Bashevis Singer

About Editors

Years ago, Ford Madox Ford referred to editors as swinging doors "that authors kick both on entering and leaving." Writer's, of course, tend to describe editors using somewhat different metaphors. Clearly an adversarial relationship is often perceived where, if there were better communication, none needs to exist. Granted, an editor's job is primarily that of a naysayer-at the Georgia Review we are forced to decline over 15,000 manuscripts each year-but that situation only exists because writers freely submit so much work arid would strongly resist any effort to curb that privilege.

One of the questions I am asked frequently at writers' conferences is, "How does it feel to have all the power that goes with being editor of the Georgia Review?" Such a question, it should be noted, is never raised by one aware of how much editing is routine drudgery, how much uncertainty editors have over near-acceptances, how much guilt accumulates over dated correspondence and aging manuscripts still awaiting responses. Power? We're just human beings, making what we hope is a responsible and creative contribution to a literary enterprise that is much larger than any individual writer or editor.

"Of Editors, Writers, and Swinging Doors" by Stanley W. Lindberg
The Writer's Chronicle December 2002

Being a Reader

I don't care if [Shakespeare’s] work was written by Bacon or by some ghost writer. Let the professors worry. I am still a reader. When you are really hungry, you don't look for the biography of the baker.

from Conversations with Isaac Bashevis Singer

When Writing Becomes Literature

Experience becomes literature when the reader ceases to care whether or not the story is true.

Precision in Language

The writer who tries to be precise is forced to reject almost all adjectives. He has to function practically with only those nouns which express clear and simple images. The language of technology does not stir the reader's emotions; it has neither the power to entertain the reader nor to lift his spirit. It may sound like a paradox, but the thicker the dictionaries become, the poorer the language is becoming for the writer of fiction. The art of writing nowadays lies not in finding new words, but in avoiding more and more those words which have become nothing but empty clichés, like "good, bad, decent, immoral, charming, ugly, noble, clever, attractive," and many, many others which are now stale.

from Conversations with Isaac Bashevis Singer

Writers as Outsiders

"We are the tools and instruments of out talent. We are outsiders; we have no place in society because society is what we're watching, and dealing with . . . . Personally, I like not being noticed. I like to hang about the shadows of the world both as a writer and as a person; I dislike limelight, and the center of things is a place to watch rather than become involved in." (William Trevor)

from "Comfort Cult: On the honest unlovliness of William Trevor's world" by Francine Prose in Harper's Magazine, December 2002