Deborah Dashow Ruth

We work in the dark -- we do what we can, we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art. -- Henry James, American novelist & critic (1843-1916)



Quotes from

THE WRITING HABIT: ESSAYS by David Huddle.

• . . . a fair portion of my writing continues to seem “beyond me” -- beyond my wisdom, intelligence, or complexity of soul. . . . Whatever that power is that enables me to transcend myself through my writing, I’ve never lerned how to summon it at will. What I have learned to appreciate most about that power is that it won’t be controlled. When I have it, I’m happy as a gambler on a winning streak. When I don’t have it, I yearn for it soon to come back to me.
• I think I’ve finally figured out several working-methods that allow me more regularly to receive and use that power when it chooses to come my way. . . .        [Distractions he works hard to avoid are letters, bills, and straightening up.]
• Every morning, when I sit down to write, I suddenly don’t want to write. [With] hours of free time open right there before me and nothing else pressing to do, when suddenly I just don’t want to write. I think of this obstacle to my writing as a small psychological membrane that must be pierced each morning.
• Now that I have made that . . . commitment to giving myself over to the written language on a daily basis, IT IS CLEARLY UNFAIR THAT I STILL HAVE TO PUT UP WITH THIS SILLY DIFFICULTY.
  
• RITUAL as the technique for dealing with SNWTWWS (the SUDDENLY-NOT-WANTING-TO-WRITE-WRITER’S-SYNDROME) I SIMPLY . . . START EDITING YESTERDAY’S NEW WRITING. . . . But the result of this little ritual of going-over my previous day’s work is that when I reach the end of that task, without even thinking about it, I’m generating new writing. I wouldn’t dream of quitting now that my concentration is focused and my energy has been released into the work.
•  What I’ve [also] come to understand is that contrary to my natural inclination, I have to work on my most important project first, or I’m not likely to work on it at all.
•  Figuring myself out has been a not insignificant part of making a productive writing life. . . . You have to construct your writing life around your own inclinations, resources, and circumstances. . . . Along with the writing itself, a writer must create his or her own methods for getting it done. . . . A few habits remain constant, but . . . what worked last year goes a little stale this year. Instinctively I make changes . . .
• These gyrations of the consciousness seem to me peculiar to the task of writing. with most other kinds of work, there are tangibles that must be dealt with -- paint, pipes, lumber and nails, destinations, hearings, stock, phone calls, etc. But an uncontracted piece of writing may remain incompletely suspended forever; with no one else caring or even knowing about it, its creator may cease work at any point -- mid-chapter, mid-paragraph, or even mid-sentence.
• WRITING IS THE MOST GOSSAMER OF TASKS. UNTIL IT IS FINISHED, ITS MAKER MUST SUFFER DOUBTS ABOUT THE METAPHYSICAL VALIDITY OF A PIECE OF WRITING.
• Dealing with UTPC (the Urge Toward Premature Completion): Having something begun but not finished brings forth a certain kind of anxiety in me. . . . My natural response has been to try to bring it to completion as quickly as possible. . . . But by rushing some of my writing, I’ve produced in it a kind of thinness, or an unrealized quality.



Quotes from Gail Sher 

One simply cannot be in a foul state of mind for part of the day and expect to arrive at her writing period in a pristine one

. . .  You must develop the you that ‘just knows’ (your intuition) and stand unwaveringly by this knowledge. When someone asks for proof, just smile and say ‘because.’

... ‘Ping’ means ‘It’s right and I know it.’ . . . When you hack away at your writing and it refuses to ping, it means you still have something to learn -- either about your subject, your feelings about your subject, or, more likely, both.

-- from Gail Sher's ONE CONTINUOUS MISTAKE: FOUR NOBLE TRUTHS FOR WRITERS 



Quotes From AN IRA SADOFF READER: SELECTED POETRY AND PROSE, by Ira Sadoff

From the chapter entitled "Hearing Voices: The Fiction of Poetic Voice":

. . . writers always shape a 'presentation self' or 'personality'; every linguistic choice self-consciously excludes, hides as well as it reveals; the poem's speaker is not exactly the writer; a poet's language only recreates or metaphorically approximates fragments of a writer's feelings. . . .

. . . So when we refer to a writer as 'confessional,' for example, we really mean a writer's language creates the fiction of intimacy. . .

. . . Because poems are dramatic experiences, feelings change as we put one word in front of the other: we never end up in the same place we begin. The language transforms reader and writer. The conscious or unconscious urge to please, in poetry as in life, dulls and limits. . . 

. . . When we speak habitually, habit being the enemy of the intensification of experience, our poems become inattentive and dull. . . .

. . . if a poet's later poems do not excite me the way his or her best earlier poems did, I think it's not only because I read the earlier oems first, but because ritual and habit -- attaching oneself to the patterns of a voice -- can intrude on the discoveries of their poems and can dull their voices.

Quotes from James Appelwhite

from "Poetry & Memory" in The Writer, October 1994, pages 24-27. 

We remember by association, or linkage, and so reading with comprehension requires, in a sense, reading with recognition . . . new knowledge acquired by the eyes and nerves from words must be connected into the networking of memory, things newly observed attaching themselves to things previously learned  . . .  

. . . I don't think it profitable for a writer to try to use memory, directly. Memory is always allowing itself to be used, but won't be coerced; there are better strategies than head-on pressure. Memory has its own processes and its own selectivity. Scenes, faces, bits of story that rise up spontaneously are thus more likely to have an emotive significance than those memories we might deliberately call up. 

. . . Really to remember is often to reencounter a part of experience, perhaps distant from present life but still related to it. Profound memory can continue the assimilation of a part of our lives we'd thought we'd finished with, but hadn't . . .  

. . . the driving force behind memory is not memory is not merely the desire to call up earlier days, but the deeply felt need to reencounter unresolved issues and emotions -- the need to understand, to come to terms with, past time. 

. . . Poetry is an old story that comes alive with the new idea. The names and the events and the rhymes are similar but never quite the same . . . The way to use time and memory as a writer is to let it use you. 

. . .  Ours are the only voices through which the past can speak, in becoming the present and the future. Ours is the equasl of any time, because it has all times within it. But the empowerment of the past lies buried, unless we can find ways to experience it as alive. The poet occasionally needs to surrender some of his or her conscious intention, even some of the present sense of self, in order to be visited by the times and presences held in the deeper layers of memory.