C. S. Lewis Quotes

Good writing is supposed to evoke sensation in the reader - not the fact that it is raining, but the feeling of being rained upon.

What has any poet to trust more than the feel of the thing? Theory concerns him only until he picks up his pen, and it begins to concern him again as soon as he lays it down.

My writing style is very sensual, as in sensory detail.

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.

Fans always say they laughed and they cried while reading my books. And I tell them that I laughed and cried while writing them.

A good writer knows that if her style and perceptions are really cooking, she can bring anything off. It's okay, of course, for novelists to depict bland, average families living bland, average lives in bland, average towns. But it isn't okay when those novelists don't outshine their bland, average subjects.

There was a lot of fiction I did not enjoy, whose landscapes seemed bland and unevocative, the characters faint-hearted within them, the very words lacking vibrancy.

Never open a book with weather. There are exceptions. If you happen to be Barry Lopez, who has more ways to describe ice and snow than an Eskimo, you can do all the weather reporting you want.

It's tough to write beautifully about ugly things, but Mitchell S. Jackson makes it look easy.

Don't ever let the other stuff get in the way of your inherent skills as a kick-butt storyteller. Move the reader, make them happy and sad and excited and scared. Make them stare into space after they've put the book down, thinking about the tale that's become a part of them.

In terms of graphic versus prose, I could probably do a lecture on that topic. But what stood out most was the difference in pacing the language and resulting scenes. One illustration can do so much for the reader.

The thing about great poetry is we have no defenses against it.

I try to write in a way that makes people feel things.

I'm the kind of writer who thinks style is just as important as the story being told.

As a writer, you're always trying to say the best thing. You're always thinking about what's the best thing to say, and what's the hardest way to say it, and what's the best line? Sometimes the best line is the simplest line. Sometimes the best line is the line that evokes more feeling than actual wordsmithing.

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.

The things I like to find in a story are punch and poetry.

I like my first lines short and declarative. No complicated sentences. Of course, that's not really a Scott thing. It's pretty classic grab-the-reader technique.

Whether in music or in fiction, the most basic thing is rhythm. Your style needs to have good, natural, steady rhythm, or people won't keep reading your work.

If you're a poet, you do something beautiful. I mean, you're supposed to leave something beautiful after you get off the page and everything. The ones you're talking about don't leave a single, solitary thing beautiful. All that maybe the slightly better ones do is sort of get inside your head and leave something there, but just because they do, just because they know how to leave something, it doesn't have to be a poem for heaven's sake. It may just be some kind of terribly fascinating, syntaxy droppings--excuse the expression. Like Manlius and Esposito and all those poor men.

What is the purpose of writing music? One is, of course, not dealing with purposes but dealing with sounds. Or the answer must take the form of a paradox: a purposeful purposeless or a purposeless play. This play, however, is an affirmation of life--not an attempt to bring order out of chaos nor to suggest improvements in creation, but simply a way of waking up to the very life we’re living, which is so excellent once one gets one’s mind and one’s desires out of its way and lets it act of its own accord.

Poetry is not the proper antithesis to prose, but to science. Poetry is opposed to science, and prose to meter. The proper and immediate object of science is the acquirement, or communication of truth; the proper and immediate object of poetry is the communication of immediate pleasure.

Good books put a finger on emotions that are deeply our own - but that we could never have described on our own.

You've got to sell your heart, your strongest reactions, not the little minor things that only touch you lightly, the little experiences that you might tell at dinner. This is especially true when you begin to write, when you have not yet developed the tricks of interesting people on paper, when you have none of the technique which it takes time to learn. When, in short, you have only your emotions to sell.

I do study Marcel Proust, for multiple technical virtuosities but also his swerve, as you say, between characters and in scenes. Certain films can help for that, too, in terms of understanding how multiple conversations at a table, or in a room, can take place and remain separate, and dissonant, and also gather themselves, accidentally, into a collective rhythm and an affect.