Writing: Create a Context
The skill of writing is to create a context in which other people can think.
Similar Posts
Commonplaces of Existence
ByHeatherMy life is spent in one long effort to escape the commonplaces of existence.
— Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, spoken by Sherlock Holmes in The Red-Headed League
Ditto.
The severest test of a character…
ByHeatherThe severest test of a character is not so much the ability to keep a secret as it is when the secret is finally out, to refrain from disclosing that you knew it all along.
I suspect that this principle of character also applies to the ability to refrain from chiming in when someone in the room is explaining something and you can’t resist what you think is a better explanation. I know that is certainly one of my challenges.
More Steinbeck on Writing
ByHeatherSometimes in a man or a woman an awareness takes place — not very often and always inexplainable. There are no words for it because there is no one ever to tell. This is a secret not kept a secret, but locked in wordlessness. The craft or art of writing is the clumsy attempt to find symbols for the wordlessness. In utter loneliness a writer tries to explain the inexplainable. And sometimes if he is very fortunate and if the time is right, a very little of what he is trying to do trickles through.
— John Steinbeck, Journals of a Novel: The East of Eden Letters
This is another installment from Steinbeck’s journals written as he was giving birth to East of Eden. It has echos from my Julian Schnabel quote when he said “That is true about all art. The conflict is to try and take what is inside of you and put it inside somebody else.”
Forecasting the Future
ByHeatherWe have two classes of forecasters: Those who don’t know — and those who don’t know they don’t know.— John Kenneth Galbraith, economist
Aristotle on Thought
ByHeatherIt is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.
— Aristotle