Design Feast Series: Quotes

“Confidence as a writer should not be confused with personal, egotistical confidence. A writer is a vehicle. I feel the story I am writing existed before I existed; I’m just the slob who finds it, and rather clumsily tries to do it, and the characters, justice. I think of writing fiction as doing justice to the people in the story, and doing justice to ‘their’ story—it’s not ‘my’ story. It’s entirely ghostly work; I’m just the medium. As a writer, I do more listening than talking. W. H. Auden called the first act of writing ‘noticing.’ He meant the vision—not so much what we make up but what we ‘witness’. Oh, sure, writers “make up” the language, the voice, the transitions, all the clunking bridges that span the story’s parts—that stuff, it’s true, is invented. I am still old-fashioned enough to maintain that what happens in a novel is what distinguishes it, and what ‘happens’ is what we see. In that sense, we’re all just reporters. Didn’t Faulkner say something like it was necessary only to write about ‘the human heart in conflict with itself’ in order to write well? Well, I think that’s all we do: We find more than we create, we simply see and expose more than we fabulate and invent. At least I do. Of course, it’s necessary to make the atmosphere of a novel more real than real, as we say. Whatever its ‘place’ is, it’s got to feel, concretely, like a place with richer detail than any place we can actually remember. I think what a reader likes best is memories, the more vivid the better. That’s the role of atmosphere in fiction: it provides details that feel as good, or as terrifying, as memories. Vienna, in my books, is more Vienna than Vienna; St. Cloud’s is more Maine than Maine.”

John Irving, Author