Guy Davenport Quotes

There's a difference between describing and evoking something. You can describe something and be quite clinical about it. To evoke it, you call it up in the reader. That's what writers do when they're good.

The funny thing about writing is, although you are writing about an experience which only you have had, you are trying to welcome other people into it, and there are ways I think of doing this, and one of them is through the senses, through the sounds and the smells.

I begin a book with imagery, more than I do with an idea or a character. Some kind of poetic image.

I think almost always that what gets me going with a story is the atmosphere, the visual imagery, and then I people it with characters, not the other way around.

Readers want to see, hear, feel, smell the action of your story, even if that action is just two people having a quiet conversation.

As a writer, I'm driven by settings. Others are driven by characters or predicaments, but with me, settings come first.

Place colors everything; It is the thing by which I find my way in my fiction.

The thing that makes vivid writing is when the reader is in the body of the story, the body of the character. Things smell like something; there's weather, there's texture, there's light.

I try to use all of my senses when describing a setting, and try to think of everything that would impact a character in any given scene.

When you are interviewing someone, don't just write down what he says. Ask yourself: Does this guy remind you of someone? What does the room feel like? Notice smells, voice inflection, neighborhoods you pass through. Be a cinematographer.

I just love details; I love trying to make the reader smell what I was smelling at the time and see what I was seeing. Textures, too - all that kind of stuff is probably my strong suit as far as my writing goes, I would say.

In descriptions of Nature one must seize on small details, grouping them so that when the reader closes his eyes he gets a picture. For instance, you'll have a moonlit night if you write that on the mill dam a piece of glass from a broken bottle glittered like a bright little star, and that the black shadow of a dog or a wolf rolled past like a ball.

Setting is my primary joy as a writer, building a world and watching people respond to it.

When I'm writing, I am concentrating almost wholly on concrete detail: the color a room is painted, the way a drop of water rolls off a wet leaf after a rain.

A lot of writing is a form of seeing - putting down what you see in terms of action and landscape.

I really love helping students and helping them empathize with people who lived a really long time ago. That's one of the highlights of working in fiction.

In journalism I can only tell what happened. In fiction, I can show it.

Yeah, in my scripts, I don't tend to describe landscape too clearly because I like to keep it really basic and sort of let people paint their own picture. I don't find it helpful to spend a page describing a setting, except for maybe a few key things.

I'm more into describing a scenario and I move around in that scenario.

Readers want to visualize your story as they read it. The more exact words you give them, the more clearly they see it, smell it, hear it, taste it. Thus, a dog should be an 'Airedale,' not just a 'dog.' A taste should not be merely 'good' but 'creamy and sweet' or 'sharply salty' or 'buttery on the tongue.'

I like the challenge of creating a world with only sentences.

One of my goals is to allow readers to see my characters and the world they inhabit as vividly as possible.

The basic rule of storytelling is 'show, don't tell.'

Any setting can potentially acquire this vividness. It slowly arrives during the period of research, until it is as immediate to me as my own real surroundings.

With most of my books, I'll actually go out and look at the setting. If you describe things carefully, it kind of makes the scene pop.