Echoes in a Hollow Space

Random quote of the day:

“A samurai, even when he has not eaten, wields his toothpick like a lord.”

—Japanese proverb



Disclaimer: The views expressed in this random quote of the day do not necessarily reflect the views of the poster, her immediate family, Desus and Mero, Beyoncé, or the Marine Corps Marching Band. They do, however, sometimes reflect the views of the Cottingley Fairies.

Random quote of the day:

“The minute a writer knows what his style is, he’s finished.”

—E. L. Doctorow, The Paris Review, Winter 1986, No. 101

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this random quote of the day do not necessarily reflect the views of the poster, her immediate family, Lucy and Ethel, Justin Bieber, or the Kardashian Klan. They do, however, sometimes reflect the views of the Cottingley Fairies.

Mirrored from Better Than Dead.

Random quote of the day:

“Style is not something applied. It is something that permeates. It is of the nature of that in which it is found, whether the poem, the manner of a god, the bearing of a man. It is not a dress.”

—Wallace Stevens, “Two or Three Ideas,” Opus Posthumous

 

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this random quote of the day do not necessarily reflect the views of the poster, her immediate family, Siegfried and Roy, Leonard Maltin, or the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. They do, however, sometimes reflect the views of the Cottingley Fairies.

 

Mirrored from Better Than Dead.

Random quote of the day:

“I don’t think style is consciously arrived at, any more than one arrives at the color of one’s eyes. After all, your style is you.”

—Truman Capote, interview, The Paris Review, No. 16, Spring-Summer 1957

 

 

Disclaimer:  The views expressed in this random quote of the day do not necessarily reflect the views of the poster, her immediate family, Siegfried and Roy, Leonard Maltin, or the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. They do, however, sometimes reflect the views of the Cottingley Fairies.

 

Mirrored from Better Than Dead.

Random quote of the day:

 

“Self-plagiarism is style.”

—Alfred Hitchcock, The Observer, August 8, 1976

 

Disclaimer:  The views expressed in this random quote of the day do not necessarily reflect the views of the poster, her immediate family, Siegfried and Roy, Leonard Maltin, or the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. They do, however, sometimes reflect the views of the Cottingley Fairies.

Mirrored from Better Than Dead.

Random quote of the day:
“Find a subject you care about and which you in your heart feel others should care about.  It is this genuine caring, and not your games with language that will be the most compelling and seductive element in your style.”

—Kurt Vonnegut, “How to Write With Style,” International Paper Co. “Power of the Printed Word” series, 1980

 

Disclaimer:  The views expressed in this random quote of the day do not necessarily reflect the views of the poster, her immediate family, Siegfried and Roy, Leonard Maltin, or the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. They do, however, sometimes reflect the views of the Cottingley Fairies.

Mirrored from Better Than Dead.

ETA: Fixed broken link.

Random quote of the day:

“Only great minds can afford a simple style.”

—Stendhal, On Love
(tr. Vyvyan Beresford Holland* and C. K. Scott Moncrieff)

*Some of you may know that Vyvyan Holland is Oscar Wilde’s son. Here’s an interesting article on Wilde’s legacy through the generations of his family.

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this random quote of the day do not necessarily reflect the views of the poster, her immediate family, Siegfried and Roy, Leonard Maltin, or the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. They do, however, sometimes reflect the views of the Cottingley Fairies.

Mirrored from Better Than Dead.

Random quote of the day:


"Style is knowing who you are, what you want to say, and not giving a damn."

—Gore Vidal, interview, The Progressive, August 2006







( Illustrated version. )




Disclaimer: The views expressed in this random quote of the day do not necessarily reflect the views of the poster, her immediate family, Siegfried and Roy, Leonard Maltin, or the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. They do, however, sometimes reflect the views of the Cottingley Fairies.

If you haven't already, and get a chance to, I recommend you read the Jeffrey Ford interview in the July 2004 issue of Locus. It'll be posted here:

http://www.locusmag.com/2004/Issues/07Ford.html

Shortly, according to the web site.

Jeffrey Ford is a particular favorite of mine, and what I particularly liked about this interview was how hauntingly familiar some of his process is. I'm light years away from being in Mr. Ford's class—quite possibly will never get there—but it's always a comfort when I can look at someone successful and recognize some, or a lot, of my crazy technique in their way of doing things. I guess it means I'm not totally crazy. Or if I am, there are other crazy people out there who've made a go of it.

Other than the egocentric stuff, I also liked what he had to say about genre vs. literary writing. "Works laboring under either of these artificial labels can be great or lousy. Basically, I don't have time for these arguments and I just have to pay attention to the work...."

I've always thought Jeffrey Ford was one of the more literary guys in the field, one of those pushing the boundaries out beyond the ghetto. He says, and I agree, that this is a liberating time for sff. The boundaries are being expanded. Or, at the very least, smudged so that it's difficult to tell where they lie. This is a good thing. This is a healthy thing.

He also makes the point that in the past, phenomenal experience and scientific projection were regarded as part of human experience, something to be included in serious works of literary art. Ask Mary Shelley, ask Shakespeare, Plato, Milton. Realism is a recent development in the history of writing. And I think, whether we are skeptics or believers, we can't deny that aspect of our humanity which exists in dreams, in the subconscious, in the phenomenal world of pure imagination. All of that messy and contradictory and emotional stuff makes us human. They're part of our animal natures, sure, filtered through the layers of our brain from the reptilian stem to the human-making frontal lobes, but they can't be separated out or denied. We may be technically advanced, but we're techno savages beneath our pinstripes—monkeys with gizmos.

SFF, and the best literary writers, recognize this, I think. We are more than the sum of our mechanistic parts and our gadgets.

Ford quotes his teacher, John Gardner, about writing being "a vivid and continuous dream." Ford goes on to say that unlike dreams, "with writing it's not something that ends in a few minutes; it carries on through the length of a story or book....you see the story in your head and then basically try to record what you see. You don't comment on it, and you almost fall into a trance. If you do it well, it allows you to get in touch with things that make the story work that you're not even conscious of." He tells his writing students that less control will get them in touch with what the story is really about.

Sure, I know so-called "organized" writers (vs. us messy organic types) will probably disagree. But...

Yeah, for people like me it's about haunting the boundaries of reason and pushing through the paper wall that separates us from...the other. That may be me talking, not Jeffrey Ford, but he definitely put me in the zone to think about this stuff.

Writing isn't a mechanical process—just like life isn't. Writing is an experience, a search after meaning, a way of trying to make sense out of things that may be contradictory or beyond our previous experience. It's a process of reconciling irreconcilable differences, of holding more than one truth inside your head at a time, of stretching beyond your level of understanding or emotional maturity. It's about taking risks and pushing the envelope, even if the envelope is only the one inside your own soul. Writing is standing on the edge of a precipice and not being afraid to see if you can fly. It's also about jumping and falling on your face. But hey, it wouldn't be any fun if there wasn't the risk of catastrophic failure, now would it?