Once again, I bring you a quotation that came to me via The Southeast Review‘s writing regimen (although I do think I’ve heard it bandied about in the past).
“Most of the basic material a writer works with is acquired before the age of fifteen.” –Willa Cather
What do you think, practicing writers? Agree? Disagree? How is this quotation relevant (or not) to your own writing practice?
I’ve subscribed to The Southeast Review‘s Writing Regimen for the month of December, and one benefit that I’m really appreciating is the receipt of a literary quotation each morning. Here’s one–sad but true–that I received over the weekend.
“Writers write about what obsesses them. You draw those cards. I lost my mother when I was 14. My daughter died at the age of 6. I lost my faith as a Catholic. When I’m writing, the darkness is always there. I go where the pain is.”
–Anne Rice
If you’re one of those writers who yearns to attend the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference but who, for whatever reason, has never quite made it to Vermont, you may be especially glad to know that you can download readings and lectures presented at the Conference. Free! Without traveling! (Hat tip to Celeste Ng/the FWR blog for reminding me that this resource is available.)
“Every writer is faced with the same question: do you write about what you know or what you don’t know? Some of my writing students, particularly my undergraduates, err to one extreme or the other. They write simply what they know, which is a transcript of Friday night’s keg party, or simply what they don’t know, which is Martians. What they need to do—and here I’m quoting a former writing teacher of mine—is write what they know about what they don’t know or what they don’t know about what they know.”
Source: Joshua Henkin, “Risk,” Glimmer Train Bulletin #35
Here’s a favorite from one of my own teachers, Richard Marius:
“All writers create. I am always annoyed to hear fiction and poetry called ‘creative’ writing as if writing that explains, describes, and narrates – nonfiction – should somehow be relegated to the basement of the writing enterprise to dwell with the pails and the pipes. To assume that only fiction and poetry are ‘creative’ is to imagine that fiction writers and poets are somehow superior to scholars, journalists, and others who report, explain, and describe. A good case may be made for the proposition that the most truly original and creative writers in our society today work in nonfiction – Tom Wolfe, Gloria Emerson, Roger Rosenblatt, Carl Schorske, Joan Didion, Joe McGinniss, John McPhee, Garry Wills, Robert Caro, David McCullough, Roger Angell, Barbara Tuchman, and a host of others.”
Source: Marius, A Writer’s Companion, first edition (New York: Knopf, 1985), 15.