#and the clearer and more faithfully she does it the more she disappears

[itspileofgoodthings]

good writing, fiction or non-fiction tbh, comes from staring at the world really hard for a long time and then through words trying to reproduce the unseen experience of all that staring.

#writing #Cc: that Flannery O’Connor essay on the nature and aim of fiction #Anyway this post brought to you by what Nina said to me yesterday about my post on Good Friday #she said she didn’t even think ‘oh Maria wrote that’ she just thought ‘yeah that’s true’ #like she was like ‘I can’t even give you credit for it because it’s just WHAT IT IS’ #(she did give me credit but credit for finding the words not the reality) #and it was just !!!!! something just really CLICKED into place when she said that #writing is about putting unseen realities into words through the very concrete gift of language #as O’Connor quoting Conrad says ‘drawing out an invisible universe by means of a visible one’ #because !!!!!!!!!! It’s about communicating not an abstraction but an EXPERIENCE #(Me teaching this article to my students: hey kids what is literature??? them tired but getting it: an EXPERIENCE not an abstraction)! #so writing is the meeting point of a gift with words. Or at least an ease with them #words have to be your MEDIUM. Your chosen means of expression #and actually having experiences from staring at reality long enough #just one or the other isn’t enough! and no by ‘experience’ I don’t mean some arbitrary bucket list of conventional items #as O’Connor says—anyone who has survived childhood has enough experience to last them a lifetime #but I do mean the experience of staring at the world #occasionally in flashes of clarity like this humility makes sense to me #a good writer is simply transcribing all sorts of things that exist outside of herself #and the clearer and more faithfully she does it the more she disappears #AND the more she is revealed #anyway of course writing is not just a literal transcription of reality. It’s about the gift of selection!!!!!!! #in other words: you have to be the right tool and you have to know how to use that tool effectively #And both of those take time but once you do you would see yourself as just a conduit. A translator for reality #anyway I just woke up very early and had some thoughts. these are the things that grow in me lately underneath the reality #of sickness and teaching and tiredness #anyway not saying I have achieved this lol. Though my Good Friday post came close! #I can say that because it was only one line