Writers on Writing
Next week BVC is producing an e-book called "Brewing Fine Fiction" with essays on writing by various BVC writers. One of the thing the editors wanted was quotes on writing.
I figured I'd delve through a few books in search of stuff that hasn't been seen a million times. The Jane Austen quote I've used a lot, but the other three are from Trollope's Autobiography, Henry James's essay on Daniel Deronda as it was coming out, and George Eliot in a letter to Charles Bray:
"I wish you would not let him plunge into a 'vortex of Dissipation.' I do not object to the Thing, but I cannot bear the expression. It is such thorough novel slang, and so old that I dare say Adam met with it in the first novel he opened." --Jane Austen
extras:
"And let [the writer] beware of creating tedium! . . . the fault may occur in chapters, in passages, in pages, in paragraphs. I know no guard against this so likely to be effective as the feeling of the writer himself. When once the sense that the thing is becoming long has grown, you may be sure that it will already be too long for readers." paraphrased from Anthony Trollope
"[Tjhose characters] produce no illusion. They are described and analyzed to death, but we don't see them nor hear them nor touch them." Henry James
"I have had the heart-cutting experience that opinions are a poor cement between human souls; and the only effect I ardently long to produce by my writings, is that those who read them should be better able to imagine and to feel the pains and the joys of those who differ from themselves in everything but the broad fact of being struggling erring human creatures." George Elliott
I figured I'd delve through a few books in search of stuff that hasn't been seen a million times. The Jane Austen quote I've used a lot, but the other three are from Trollope's Autobiography, Henry James's essay on Daniel Deronda as it was coming out, and George Eliot in a letter to Charles Bray:
"I wish you would not let him plunge into a 'vortex of Dissipation.' I do not object to the Thing, but I cannot bear the expression. It is such thorough novel slang, and so old that I dare say Adam met with it in the first novel he opened." --Jane Austen
extras:
"And let [the writer] beware of creating tedium! . . . the fault may occur in chapters, in passages, in pages, in paragraphs. I know no guard against this so likely to be effective as the feeling of the writer himself. When once the sense that the thing is becoming long has grown, you may be sure that it will already be too long for readers." paraphrased from Anthony Trollope
"[Tjhose characters] produce no illusion. They are described and analyzed to death, but we don't see them nor hear them nor touch them." Henry James
"I have had the heart-cutting experience that opinions are a poor cement between human souls; and the only effect I ardently long to produce by my writings, is that those who read them should be better able to imagine and to feel the pains and the joys of those who differ from themselves in everything but the broad fact of being struggling erring human creatures." George Elliott