All of you know I am nuts about quotations--and I have explained my reasons over and over--but I must quote to prove the power of quotations.
One writer, talking about himself and another writer said: "His characters are always seven feet tall and invincible, mine are five feet eight and nervous." I laughed out loud when I read that. And every time I read it I see new meaning in it. It could be the answer to the question: "What is the difference between romance fiction and the fiction we call realistic fiction?" All Romantic novels have invincible, handsome, tall men and breathtakingly beautiful women. In real life people are pimply, short, nervous.
But it was really two other quotations I came across that made me want to read to all of you the wonderful words I read. "Most writers are trying to find out what they think or feel...saying the unsayable and steadily asking, 'What do I really feel about this?'" So many times people stop me and ask me, "How can you think of so many things to write about?" The question always puzzles me. It's as if they were to wonder at the fact that all the time I am awake, I am thinking.
Writing, for me, is thinking, is finding out, through the disciplined form called writing, what I really feel about something--what I really think about this issue--and this issue is whatever is on my mind at the time. As we grow old, more and more crowds into our mind--if we are alive, if we are thinking.
And here is a quotation that says the same thing slightly differently. "Writing a story or a novel is one way of discovering sequence in experience, of stumbling upon cause and effect in the happening's of a writer's own life." In part, writers write to learn about themselves--to discover sequence, cause and effect, in their own life. Of course there are many other reasons why writers write. A quotation is one-sided, captures a small part of the total truth--but quotes are wonderful, enlightening.
And here, finally, is the quotation about writing that I like best: "For any writer worthy of the name...there are moments during the writing process when the rest of the planet might as well have gone to Venus. And those moments are not for sale." In essence, in the midst of the writing process, a writer is on a runner's high.
You can't buy a runner's high; you can't buy a writer's high--and how much better Maria Lenhart said it: "the rest of the planet might as well have gone to Venus."
Copyright © 2004 Henry Morgenstein