4
" Here is something I understand about psychology, and I think it relates to fiction: if you loosen up your understanding of yourself in some way, then who knows how it will affect who you are in the world. In the same way, you can explore an avenue of your character - something about your character's past, or something in your character's present - and you don't know how the reader is going to connect it to what's going on in the story. That gives the reader a wonderful job to do, which is to try to make the links. I don't think you need to plan that in advance, or ever. I think it can happen if you follow what you think is interesting about the character.
In order to do this, you must trust what you don't understand. Our minds are so adept at trying to explain things that you have to shut that instinct down. As a starting point, choose an action that you can't explain. Often, writing about something that you don't fully get - what it's about or what's in it - is actually very useful because it takes you away from talking about theme or talking about abstractions. If you don't know what something is about, you are probably going to be very concrete in your exploration of it. You're going to say, 'I don't know what's in this world, so I'm going to be very direct in the way I present it.' This gives the reader tons of space to form his or her own interpretations. "
― Dorothy Allison , The Writer's Notebook: Craft Essays from Tin House
7
" One member of Paley's preschool class is 'The Boy Who Would Be a Helicopter.' He is probably vaguely autistic, high-functioning, yet solitary to a degree considered irregular. His playmates invite him into their games (which are ongoing, morphing narratives), but he stubbornly resists. He loves his helicopter. He would like to be a helicopter himself so that he could fly with his friend, the machine, and have adventures. Machine adventures. Rescue missions, yet with rotors, so that, perhaps, there wouldn't be hugging involved. (Antonya Nelson) "
― Dorothy Allison , The Writer's Notebook: Craft Essays from Tin House
8
" [The Great Gatsby] is a tour de force of revision. So much so that critics, who rarely mention the edit of a book, commented on the quality of Gatsby's rewriting, not just its writing, in reviews. For H. L. Mencken, the novel had 'a careful and brilliant finish. ... There is evidence in every line of hard work and intelligent effort. ... The author wrote, tore up, rewrote, tore up again. There are pages so artfully contrived that one can no more imagine improvising them than one can imagine improvising a fugue.' ... Careful, sound, carefully written, hard effort, wrote and rewrote, artfully contrived not improvised, structure, discipline: all these terms refer, however obliquely, not to the initial act of inspiration, but to editing.
Organization and clarity do not dominate the writing process. At some point, though, a writer must pull coherence from confusion, illuminate what lives in shadow, shade what shines too brightly. Gatsby is the cat's meow case study of crossing what Michael Ondaatje calls 'that seemingly uncrossable gulf between an early draft of a book ... and a finished product' - in other words, editing. "
― Dorothy Allison , The Writer's Notebook: Craft Essays from Tin House
14
" One danger zone is dialogue ... At the moment of ultimate showing, we writers get nervous. ... We allow characters to tell us about the story, to soliloquize, to have insights into their lives that no real person could manage. We also work very hard to control the part of dialogue that is not in the character's voice - the tags. We have the characters chortle and wheeze and whisper and whine; we use adverbs to remind the reader and reassure ourselves how things are being said. A nice contrast to this tendency is the following conversation, form Ernest Hemingway's story 'The Sea Change':
'No thanks,' he said.
'It doesn't do any good to say I'm sorry.'
'No.'
'Nor to tell you how it is?'
'I'd rather not hear.'
'I love you very much.'
'Yes, this proves it.'
'I'm sorry,' she said, 'if you don't understand.'
'I understand. That's the trouble. I understand.'
How different our experience would be if the storytelling were more anxious:
'No thanks,' he said bitterly, the words sharp in his mouth.
'It doesn't do any good to say I'm sorry?' she poignantly wondered.
'No.' Phil touched her hand with his, then drew it away. He ground his teeth.
'Nor to tell you how it is?' she Sapphically queried.
'I'd rather not hear,' he groused.
'I love you very much,' she said, perhaps ingenuously.
(Peter Rock) "
― Dorothy Allison , The Writer's Notebook: Craft Essays from Tin House