Means of grasping the self

In The Art of the Novel, Milan Kundera, in conversation with Christian Salmon, discusses the difficulties of grasping the self. He states: All novels, of every age, are concerned with the enigma of the self. As …

Four great motives for writing

I am reading Why I Write by George Orwell, and in the essay with the same title, he identifies four great motives for writing that he thinks exist in every writer in differing degrees, according to the atmosphere …

Writer’s block is simply a failure of ego

I am reading Let Me Tell You What I Mean by Joan Didion and she wrote that “All writing is generated by a certain minimum of ego: you must assume a position of authority in saying that the way I’m writing it is …

A way of looking but not joining

I am reading Let Me Tell You What I Mean by Joan Didion and in this essay titled Last Words, she has written about Hemingway: The very grammar of a Hemingway sentence dictated, or was dictated by, a certain way of …

Shimmering images in Didion’s mind

I’m reading Joan Didion’s essay “Why I Write” in her book Let Me Tell You What I Mean. She describes how certain images get stuck in her head and how she weaves stories around them. She describes these as images …

Writing is the act of saying I

I am reading Joan Didion’s book Let Me Tell You What I Mean, and in the essay I particularly bought the book for, titled Why I Write, Didion writes: In many ways, writing is the act of saying I, of imposing …

Writing is like painting, and some more

I watched an Orhan Pamuk interview on YouTube where he explains his “painterly practice” and how writing and painting are similar to him. Pamuk explains: I think writing novels is also like painting—visual …

Writing as image making

While browsing Meg Miller's Are.na page, I was immediately drawn in by the title of her top channel: Shimmer Around the Edges: Writing as Image-making From the channel introduction, it seems Miller also noticed …

One can't write directly about the soul

I’m listening to Maria Popova of Brain Pickings in conversation with Krista Tippett on the On Being podcast. Popova shares that, according to Virginia Woolf’s diary, one cannot observe the soul directly—because …

I, you, and we

I have been noticing for a long time now that using “I” or “you” while writing about ideas makes a big difference. If I use “you” when writing, it sounds like I am positioning the reader in the situation I am …

Thought associations and drifting memories

I'm listening to Kazuo Ishiguro's Nobel Prize lecture (2017), where he shares a realization he had after writing a screenplay and a novel only a year apart: My first novel and my first TV screenplay were too …