I’ve never thought of writing as the mere arrangement of words on the page but the attempted embodiment of a vision; a complex of emotions; raw experience. The effort of memorable art is to evoke in the reader or spectator emotions appropriate to that effort.
Some writers need to sink in order to feel what their characters feel; in order to write their characters with the truest feeling possible. Those closest to those writers end up feeling the effects of that process. It takes a strong person to be with an emphatic writer.
When you write a manuscript, it feels like being in a relationship with someone. You'll hate it, get bored with it, be pissed of, like you just want to break up. But, just like any relationship, you will fall in love again and again, like you don't want to lose it.
You can be a good painter if you study Cézanne's vision. Whoever dares to copy Van Gogh falls inevitably into the hell of imitators. For this painter didn't care about masterpieces, or even good paintings... but about what is beyond all painting, all art.
He cut away the insignificant and incidental. Those bits were tossedaway from the juicy core pieces. He slid the excess tissue and tendons away and reorganized the good bits on his plate. Those pieces were translated into words and catchy phrases and assembled like a new life.
But in the wake of 'Bullet,' all the guys wanted to know was, 'How's it doing? How's it selling?' How to tell them I didn't give a flying fuck how it was doing in the marketplace, that what I cared about was how it was doing in the reader's heart?
Steven wrote to me today, saying, 'Don't you feel like sticking your head out of the window and yelling, "I DON'T KNOW WHAT I'M DOING!!!"' Yes, absolutely. Solidarity. Fear is always the same. Different worries with different scripts, but the same baseline fear.
Isn't the writing of good prose an emotional excitement?""Yes, of course it is. At least, when you get the thing dead right and know it's dead right, there's no excitement like it. It's marvelous. It makes you feel like God on the Seventh Day – for a bit, anyhow.
...ugly interlopers threaten to choke off your story, depriving it of much-needed nutrition, sunlight and water. Identify and cut those weeds – the life-sucking adverbs, the shade-killing descriptions that don’t move the story forward, the crowding passive voice sentences.
Being in the mood to write, like being in the mood to make love, is a luxury that isn't necessary in a long-term relationship. Just as the first caress can lead to a change of heart, the first sentence, however tentative and awkward, can lead to a desire to go just a little further.
A writer's problem does not change. He himself changes and the world he lives in changes but his problem remains the same. It is always how to write truly and, having found what is true, to project it in such a way that it becomes a part of the experience of the person who reads it.
The writer,' said Donald Barthelme, 'is one who, embarking upon a task, does not know what to do.' In this mode of not-knowing, the thick-torsoed, literal, and crew-cut mind is moved to the sidelines in favor of the swinging, perceptive, light-footed, tutu-wearing subconscious.
Sometimes when I am writing, I feel as though I were not reliving the events I describe here, but rather living them. That there is no distance at all, and that I do not know how my story will end. It is an extraordinary sensation, since, of course, I know only too well how it will all end.
I like to play around with my nightmares. Whenever I have a bad dream – something strange and unnerving – I write it down, sometimes in the middle of the night when everyone around me is sleeping soundly, and then I come back to it the next morning and see what I can make of it.
My mood, as I identify with each of my heroes, resembles what I used to feel when I played alone as a child. Like all children, I liked to play make-believe, to put myself in someone else's place and imagine dream worlds in which I was a soldier, a famous soccer player, or a great hero.
