| [00:01.52] |
Lesson 39 |
| [00:03.44] |
What every writer wants |
| [00:11.73] |
How do professional writers ignore what they were taught at school about writing? |
| [00:19.84] |
I have known very few writers, |
| [00:22.18] |
but those I have known and whom I respect, confess at once that they have little idea where they are going when they first set pen to paper. |
| [00:33.22] |
They have a character, perhaps two; |
| [00:35.91] |
they are in that condition of eager discomfort which passes for inspiration all admit radical changes of destination once the journey has begun; |
| [00:47.54] |
one, to my certain knowledge, spent nine months on a novel about Kashmir, |
| [00:53.21] |
then reset the whole thing in the Scottish Highlands. |
| [00:57.73] |
I never heard of anyone making a 'skeleton', as we were taught at school. |
| [01:03.33] |
In the breaking and remaking, in the timing interweaving, beginning afresh, |
| [01:10.07] |
the writer comes to discern things in his material which were not consciously in his mind when he began. |
| [01:17.55] |
This organic process, |
| [01:19.69] |
often leading to moments of extraordinary self-discovery, is of an indescribable fascination. |
| [01:28.29] |
A blurred image appears; he adds a brushstroke and another and it is gone |
| [01:35.34] |
but something was there, and he will not rest till he has captured it. |
| [01:41.10] |
Sometimes the yeast within a writer outlives a book he has written. |
| [01:47.27] |
I have heard of writers who read nothing but their own books; |
| [01:51.51] |
like adolescents they stand before the mirror, |
| [01:54.77] |
and still cannot fathom the exact outline of the vision before them. |
| [01:59.96] |
For the same reason, writers talk interminably about their own books, |
| [02:05.78] |
winkling out hidden meanings, super-imposing new ones, |
| [02:10.63] |
begging response from those around them. |
| [02:13.65] |
Of course a writer doing this is misunderstood: he might as well try to explain a crime or a love affair. |
| [02:21.69] |
He is also, incidentally, an unforgivable bore. |
| [02:26.49] |
This temptation to cover the distance between himself and the reader, |
| [02:31.13] |
to study his image in the sight of those who do not know him, can be his undoing: he has begun to write to please. |
| [02:40.70] |
A young English writer made the pertinent observation a year or two back |
| [02:46.26] |
that the talent goes into the first draft, and the art into the drafts that follow. |
| [02:52.68] |
For this reason also the writer, like any other artist, |
| [02:56.48] |
has no resting place, no crowd or movement in which he may take comfort, |
| [03:02.18] |
no judgment from outside which can replace the judgment from within. |
| [03:07.86] |
A writer makes order out of the anarchy of his heart; |
| [03:12.04] |
he submits himself to a more ruthless discipline than any critic dreamed of, |
| [03:17.70] |
and when he flirts with fame, he is taking time off from living with himself, |
| [03:23.02] |
from the search for what his world contains at its inmost point. |
