Rabbit-holes: Thinking

“My wound is geography.”

—Prince of Tides - Pat Conroy—

“In most of these (Stegner’s) books, certain elements repeat—geographical dislocation, thwarted ambition, financial uncertainty, the death of a child. Time is marked by the milestones of family life, rather than the signposted public happenings that festoon historical and self-consciously topical novels. Wars and presidential administrations pass almost without mention, perhaps because, even in the post-frontier West, local matters of settlement and subsistence were likely to feel more pressing. More than that, political and even artistic concerns could seem abstract and insubstantial compared with the warmth and gravity of human relationships.”

—From the NYT article about Wallace Stegner, June, 2020—

Roth: “Exhilaration and groaning. Frustration and freedom. Inspiration and uncertainty. Abundance and emptiness. Blazing forth and muddling through. The day-by-day repertoire of oscillating dualities that any talent withstands—and tremendous solitude too. And the silence: 50 years in a room silent as the bottom of a pool, eking out, when all went well, my minimum daily allowance of usable prose.”

—Interviewer asking Philip Roth: “Looking back how do you recall your 50-plus years as a writer?—

“Right now, we need writers who know the difference between production of a market commodity and the practice of an art.”

—From Urusula Leguin (RIP)—

My mom often said: “Why is there always enough time to do it over and never enough time to do it right the first time?”

Unfortunately, my writing fell prey to that. Trying to make a first draft ANYTHING BUT SHITTY. You can’t. A novel requires a writer to do it over and over and over. I’m just now realizing why sitting down and just writing forward, writing an out-of-sequence scene is so hard for me. But that’s the goal. That’s my job is to just write. This first draft of the new novel (working title “Night Falls”) has zero to do with editing, or rewriting. It’s about dreaming of what could be. Write forward. (I may continue to struggle with the writing scenes out of sequence!)

Peter Heller: “I hope people talk about loss and its relationship to everything meaningful, and everything courageous, and everything we create.”