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Quotation of the Week: Gish Jen, on Apple Computers & Writing

by Erika Dreifus on
Disabled

As for whether the Apple computers changed not only who wrote, but what they wrote, I can’t speak for others. I can only say that these computers coaxed out of me an expansiveness the typewriter never did. For every writer, the leap from short story to novel is, well, a leap. It involves faith, and resources, and a conception, finally, of how much room is yours in the world. I was not a person who would have looked at a ream of paper and thought, “Sure, that is mine to fill up.” But I turned out to be a person who could keep moving a cursor until I’d filled one ream, then another. It is a truly minuscule reason, in the scheme of things, for which to celebrate and mourn Steve Jobs. Still, I add my small reason to the infinity of others.

–Gish Jen

Source: Jen’s lovely op-ed in last Sunday’s New York Times, “My Muse Was an Apple Computer”

Quotation of the Week: Roger Ebert

by Erika Dreifus on
Disabled

“When I write, I fall into the zone many writers, painters, musicians, athletes, and craftsmen of all sorts seem to share: In doing something I enjoy and am expert at, deliberate thoughts fall aside and it is all just there. I think of the next word no more than the composer thinks of the next note.”

–Roger Ebert

Source: “Roger Ebert on Writing: !5 Reflections from Life Itself,” TheAtlantic.com. For more about Ebert’s new memoir, see Harvey Freedenberg’s review for Bookreporter.

Quotation of the Week: Geraldine Brooks

by Erika Dreifus on
Disabled

“Foreign countries exist.”
–Geraldine Brooks

Extracting from Edward Nawotka’s recent Publishing Perspectives post, I discern that the introduction to the next volume of Best American Short Stories, which was edited by Geraldine Brooks, “notes a surprising parochialism in the stories” that Brooks reviewed in preparing the book.

Being me, I couldn’t help but reflect on some similar sentiments I’ve experienced (and expressed) along the way of my writing practice.

Quotation of the Week: Barbara Kingsolver

by Erika Dreifus on
Disabled

For a story to make the cut I asked a lot from it – asked of it, in fact, what I ask of myself when I sit down to write, and that is to get straight down to it and carve something hugely important into a small enough amulet to fit inside a reader’s most sacred psychic pocket. I don’t care what it’s about, as long as it’s not trivial. I once heard a writer declare from a lectern: “I write about the mysteries of the human heart, which is the only thing a fiction writer has any business addressing.” And I thought to myself, Excuse me? I had recently begun thinking of myself as a fiction writer and was laboring under the illusion that I could address any mystery that piqued me, including but not limited to the human heart, human risk factors, human rights….The business of fiction is to probe the tender spots of an imperfect world, which is where I live, write and read.

–Barbara Kingsolver

Source: Kingsolver’s introduction to Best American Short Stories 2001, ed. Katrina Kenison, Barbara Kingsolver (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2001), pp. xvii-xix.