Posts tagged writing

I write because I have an innate need to write. I write because I can’t do normal work like other people. I write because I want to read books like the ones I write. I write because I am angry at all of you, angry at everyone. I write because I love sitting in a room all day writing. I write because I can only partake in real life by changing it. I write because I want others, all of us, the whole world, to know what sort of life we lived, and continue to live, in Istanbul, in Turkey. I write because I love the smell of paper, pen, and ink. I write because I believe in literature, in the art of the novel, more than I believe in anything else. I write because it is a habit, a passion. I write because I am afraid of being forgotten. I write because I like the glory and interest that writing brings. I write to be alone. Perhaps I write because I hope to understand why I am so very, very angry at all of you, so very, very angry at everyone. I write because I like to be read. I write because once I have begun a novel, an essay, a page, I want to finish it. I write because everyone expects me to write. I write because I have a childish belief in the immortality of libraries, and in the way my books sit on the shelf. I write because it is exciting to turn all of life’s beauties and riches into words. I write not to tell a story, but to compose a story. I write because I wish to escape from the foreboding that there is a place I must go but – just as in a dream – I can’t quite get there. I write because I have never managed to be happy. I write to be happy.

—Orhan Pamuk, in his speech accepting the 2006 Nobel Prize in Literature

Good sentences, the ebullient critic and novelist Wilfrid Sheed wrote in 1990, are sent into the air like a series of jazz licks.“You noodle around with tempo and sound until you get the perfect fit for that particular song, and then, so long as you can sustain it, God is on your side and everything comes easily and even the waiters smile.”

—Dwight Garner, in The New York Times Magazine’s year-end feature The Lives They Lived

‘Authorship’ — in the sense we know it today, individual intellectual effort related to the book as an economic commodity — was practically unknown before the advent of print technology. Medieval scholars were indifferent to the precise identity of the ‘books’ they studied. In turn, they rarely signed even what was clearly their own. They were a humble service organization. Procuring texts was often a very tedious and time-consuming task. Many small texts were transmitted into volumes of miscellaneous content, very much like ‘jottings’ in a scrapbook, and, in this transmission, authorship was often lost.

The invention of printing did away with anonymity, fostering ideas of literary fame and the habit of considering intellectual effort as private property. Mechanical multiples of the same text created a public — a reading public. The rising consumer-oriented culture became concerned with labels of authenticity and protection against theft and piracy. The idea of copyright — ‘the exclusive right to reproduce, public, and sell the matter and form of a literary of artistic work’ — was born.

Xerography — every man’s brain-picker — heralds the times of instant publishing. Anybody can now become both author and publisher. Take any books on any subject and custom-make your own book by simply xeroxing a chapter from this one, a chapter from that one — instant steal!

As new technologies come into play, people are less and less convinced of the importance of self-expression. Teamwork succeeds private effort.

McLuhan, Marshall. “The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects.” Madera, CA: Gingko Press, 1967. Pp 122-23.

“In many ways writing is the act of saying I, of imposing oneself upon other people, of saying listen to me, see it my way, change your mind. Its an aggressive, even a hostile act. You can disguise its aggressiveness all you want with veils of subordinate clauses and qualifiers and tentative subjunctives, with ellipses and evasionswith the whole manner of intimating rather than claiming, of alluding rather than statingbut theres no getting around the fact that setting words on paper is the tactic of a secret bully, an invasion, an imposition of the writers sensibility on the readers most private space. …

“I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.”

—Joan Didion (born today in 1934)

[excerpted from “Why I Write,” published in The New York Times Magazine, Dec. 5, 1976]

1. Position the author, say who she/he is and what the book represents in relation to her/his work.

2. Situate the book and judge it from the perspective of a long literary tradition.

3. Give reasoned arguments, with examples, so that the reader can understand and evaluate.

4. Inform, educate and entertain.

5. Little synopsis and plot.

6. Be informative about the style, the meaning and the symbolic weight of the book.

7. Say what the author thinks about the theme of the book.

8. Say what the critic thinks about what the author of the book says about the theme of the book.

9. Neither bludgeon nor drool, a considered decision and a measured foundation are more convincing than an outburst.

10. Ban the adjectives of advertising, it’s the reader who should decide.

[From Winston Manrique Sabogal’s piece on the state of literary criticism in El Pais / via Melville House]