The miracle of reading is that now and then you run into an author who speaks for you, who articulates exactly what is in the depths of your heart. The following says about good writing what I would like to say.
“The last couple of years have been pretty arid for me good-work-wise, but the one way I’ve progressed I think is I’ve gotten convinced that there’s something timelessly vital and sacred about good writing. This thing doesn’t have that much to do with talent, even glittering talent like Daitch’s. Talent’s just an instrument. It’s like having a pen that works instead of one that doesn’t. I’m not saying I’m able to work consistently out of the premise, but it seems to me like the big distinction between good art and so-so art lies somewhere in the art’s heart’s purpose, the agenda of the consciousness behind the text. It’s got something to do with love. With having the discipline to talk out of the part of yourself that can love instead of the part that just wants to be loved. I know this doesn’t sound hip at all. I don’t know. But it seems like one of the things really great fiction-writers do – from Carver to Chekhov to Flannery O’Connor, or like the Tolstoy of “The Death of Ivan Ilych,” or the Pynchon of Gravity’s Rainbow – is give the reader something. The reader walks away from real art heavier than she came to it. Fuller. All the attention and engagement and work you need to get from the reader can’t be for your benefit; it’s got to be for hers. What’s poisonous about the cultural environment today is that it makes this so scary to try to carry out. Really good work probably comes out of a willingness to disclose yourself, open yourself up in spiritual and emotional ways that risk making you look banal or melodramatic or naive or unhip or sappy, and to ask the reader to feel something. To be willing to sort of die in order to move the reader, somehow.”
From: Conversations with David Foster Wallace – Larry McCaffery Interview, 1993.
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }