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#occasionally in flashes of clarity like this humility makes sense to me
itspileofgoodthings
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2 years
Text
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
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