On a quick hop up to Vermont, my son Alex and I each wandered through The Vermont Book Shop, a cozy and inviting indie with plenty of fuel to feed bookaholic fires on cold winter nights. In his browse-around amble, Alex turned up a treasure: The World of Raymond Chandler. A Chandler fan myself (see the post, Blue-clock Socks), I took a peek — and found a cache of timely thoughts on writing:
“A writer who hates the actual writing, who gets no joy out of the creation of magic by words, to me, is simply not a writer at all… How can you hate the magic which makes a paragraph or sentence or line of dialogue or a description something in the nature of a new creation?”
“[Literature is] any sort of writing that glows with its own heat.”
“I have no theories on writing; I just write. If it doesn’t seem to me to be good, I throw it away.”
“If I’m going slow, I’m in trouble. It means I’m pushing the words out instead of being pulled be them.”
“Most writers sacrifice too much humanity for too little art.”
“The business of a fiction writer is to recreate the illusion of life.”
“Me, I wait for inspiration, though I don’t necessarily call it by that name. I believe that all writing that has any life in it is done with the solar plexus. It is hard work in the sense that it may leave you tired, even exhausted. In the sense of conscious effort it is not work…”
“There should be the space of time, say four hours a day at least, when a professional writer doesn’t do anything but write. He doesn’t have to write, and if he doesn’t feel like it, he shouldn’t try. He can look out the window or stand on his head or writhe on the floor, but he is not to do any other positive thing, not read, write letters, glance at magazines, or write checks. Write or nothing.”
And here’s an “analyze and imitate” exercise that sounds incredibly useful:
“[In preparing “Blackmailers”] I did something I have never been able to persuade any other writer to do…I made a detailed synopsis of a story, say by Erle Stanley Gardner, then tried to write the story. Then I compared it with the professional work and saw where I failed to make an effect or had the pace wrong or some other mistake. Then I wrote it over and over.”
Musings to ponder and apply from a master craftsman as we all write on.