Fantasy is no good unless the seed it springs from is a truth, a truth about human beings.
I had to grow up and learn to listen for the unspoken as well as the spoken-and to know a truth.
Writing fiction has developed in me an abiding respect for the unknown in a human lifetime and a sense of where to look for the threads, how to follow, how to connect, find in the thick of the tangle what clear line persists.
How can you go out on a limb if you do not know your own tree? No art ever came out of not risking your neck. And risk – experiment – is a considerable part of the joy of doing.
Making reality real is art’s responsibility.
Human life is fiction’s only theme.
To open up the new, to look back on the old may bring forth like discoveries in the practice of art.
Writing a story or a novel is one way of discovering sequence in experience, of stumbling upon cause and effect in the happenings of a writer’s own life.
Each day the storm clouds were opening like great purple flowers and pouring out their dark thunder. Each nightfall, the storm was laid down on their houses like a burden the day had carried.
Suppose you meet me in the woods.
The mystery in how little we know of other people is no greater than the mystery of how much, Laurel thought.
Laurel could not see her face but only the back of her neck, the most vulnerable part of anybody, and she thought: Is there any sleeping person you can be entirely sure you have not misjudged?
Through travel I first became aware of the outside world; it was through travel that I found my own introspective way into becoming a part of it.
It is our inward journey that leads us through time – forward or back, seldom in a straight line, most often spiraling. Each of us is moving, changing, with respect to others. As we discover, we remember; remembering, we discover; and most intensely do we experience this when our separate journeys converge. Our living experience at those meeting points is one of the charged dramatic fields of fiction.
I read library books as fast as I could go, rushing them home in the basket of my bicycle. From the minute I reached our house, I started to read. Every book I seized on, from “Bunny Brown and His Sister Sue at Camp Rest-a-While” to “Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea,” stood for the devouring wish to read being instantly granted. I knew this was bliss, knew it at the time. Taste isn’t nearly so important; it comes in its own time.
The events in our lives happen in a sequence in time, but in their significance to ourselves they find their own order, a timetable not necessarily – perhaps not possibly – chronological. The time as we know it subjectively is often the chronology that stories and novels follow: it is the continuous thread of revelation.
The first act of insight is throw away the labels. In fiction, while we do not necessarily write about ourselves, we write out of ourselves, using ourselves; what we learn from, what we are sensitive to, what we feel strongly about – these become our characters and go to make our plots. Characters in fiction are conceived from within, and they have, accordingly, their own interior life; they are individuals every time.
A plot is a thousand times more unsettling than an argument, which may be answered.
The fantasies of dying could be no stranger than the fantasies of living. Survival is perhaps the strangest fantasy of them all.
It’s the form it takes when it comes out the other side, of course, that gives a story something unique – its life. The story, in the way it has arrived at what it is on the page, has been something learned, by dint of the story’s challenge and the work that rises to meet it – a process as uncharted for the writer as if it had never been attempted before.