When your power comes from others, on approval, you are their slave. Never sacrifice yourselves – never! Whoever urges you to self-sacrifice is worse than a common murderer, who at least cuts your throat himself, without persuading YOU to do it.
Because I don’t have to be careful of people’s feelings when I teach literature, and I do when I’m teaching writing.
I teach one semester a year, and this year I’m just teaching one course during that semester, a writing workshop for older students in their late 20s and early 30s, people in our graduate program who are already working on a manuscript and trying to bring it to completion.
Reasons always came with a purpose, to give the appearance of a struggle between principle and desire. Principle had power only until you found what you had to have.
You felt it as a depth of ease in certain boys, their innate, affable assurance that they would not have to struggle for a place in the world; that is already reserved for them.
But a lot of writers – and I’m one of them – do tend to feel dissatisfied. It makes you a little hard to live with, but it’s a goad and does keep you alert and restless.
There are writers who do start doing the same thing again and again and almost inevitably fall into self-parody.
We each after a while have to become reconciled to what it is that our talents and appetites lead us to.
Writers cannot let themselves be servants of the official mythology. They have to, whatever the cost, say what truth they have to say.
Memory is funny. Once you hit a vein the problem is not how to remember but how to control the flow.
I was giving up – being realistic, as people liked to say, meaning the same thing. Being realistic made me feel bitter.
What writers do is they tell their own story constantly through other people’s stories. They imagine other people, and those other people are carrying the burden of their struggles, their questions about themselves.
You don’t teach information in a writing workshop.
There’s a joy in writing short stories, a wonderful sense of reward when you pull certain things off.
Perhaps that is why the novel flourished in England. You had these communities that would stay put and people would see one another all the time and cause one another to change and have the opportunity to observe the changes over time.
One of the last courses I taught was on the Russian short story, which I love.
I love Chekhov. I could go on all day about him.
Like so many writers I started writing stories because I didn’t have much time for anything else.
It’s probably why I’m a short story writer. I tend to remember things in the past in narrative form, in story form, and I grew up around people who told stories all the time.
Work for most people is really very social, and the actual thinking is often done in community.