The Tricks of the Trade

Everything a writer learns about the art or craft of fiction takes just a little away from his need or desire to write at all. In the end he knows all the tricks and has nothing to say. (Raymond Chandler)

Judging Your Work

From an interview with Flannery O'Connor

Q. By what standards do you judge your own work? Is objectivity difficult? Are you ever fully satisfied with a finished work?

A. I suppose the standards are largely instinctive. I have a sort of feeling for what I'm doing, else I wouldn't be doing it. I don't suppose objectivity is difficult. I wouldn't be attached to a sorry story just because I had written it. Sometimes you need time between you and the story before you can really see it whole; usually it's good to see how somebody else reads it. Distance is always a help. Sometimes I'm fully satisfied with something I've written but most of the time I'm just satisfied that this is the best I can do with my limitations.

from Conversations with Flannery O'Connor edited by Rosemary M. Magee. Excerpt from an Interview with C. Ross Mullins, Jr. published in Jubilee, June 1963

Giving Up the Ghost

"On any given week, up to half of any nonfiction best-seller list is written by someone other than the name on the book," declared a 1997 New York Times piece that examined the growing presence of ghostwritten books in the publishing world. "Add those authors who feel enough latent uneasiness to bury the writer's name in the acknowledgements and the percentage, according to one agent, reaches as high as 80."

Sadly, very few of them are worth reading, including many of those I'd had a hand in producing.

Autobiography, if there really is such a thing, is like asking a rabbit to tell us what he looks like hopping through the grasses of the field. How would he know? If we want to hear about the field, on the other hand, no one is in a better circumstance to tell us--so long as we keep in mind that we are missing all those things the rabbit was in no position to observe."

Cocktail party material aside, somewhere along, the way, I lost my way. When I started I told myself that ghostwriting was as good a training ground for a novelist as most any other kind of writing, that someday I would resurrect my unpublished novel and be equipped, at long last, with the necessary skills to fix it. That by studying others' voices I would learn how to shape and refine my own. This was the crux of my John Hopkins voice class. Learning to modulate, even appropriate another's voice was useful, I instructed. Yet after a while, I warned my students, ghostwriting becomes an exercise in ventriloquism and nothing much else.

THE WRITER'S CHRONICLE (Volume 35, Number 1) from "Giving Up the Ghost" by Barbara Feinman Todd

Dealing with the Unspoken

[Thornton] "Wilder taught me that what a writer deals with is the unspoken, what people see or sense in silence."

Great Deeds & Great Thoughts

All great deeds and all great thoughts have a ridiculous beginning. (Albert Camus)

Alice Walker on Flannery O'Connor

"It was for her description of Southern white women that I appreciated her work at first, because when she set her pen to them not a whiff of magnolia hovered in the air (and the tree itself might never have been planted), and yes, I could say, yes, these white folks without the magnolia . . . and these black folks without melons and superior racial patience, these are like Southerners that I know . . . . That she retained a certain distance (only, however, in her later, mature work) from the inner workings of her black characters seems to me all to her credit, since, by deliberately limiting her treatment of them to cover their observable demeanor and actions, she leaves them free, in the reader's imagination, to inhabit another land-scape, another life ....This is a kind of grace many writers do not have when dealing with representatives of an oppressed people within a story, and their insistence on knowing everything. . . has burdened us with more stereotypes than we can ever hope to shed."

from in "Beyond the Peacock" from:

In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens: Womanist Prose

We Are What We Read

An extraterrestrial being, newly arrived on Earth - scrutinizing what we mainly present to our children in television, radio, newspapers, magazines, the comics, and many books - might easily conclude that we are intent on teaching them murder, rape, cruelty, superstition, credulity, and consumerism. We keep at it, and through constant repetition many of them finally get it." (Carl Sagan)