"If it didn't happen, call it fiction"
May
07
by Hayley Haugen
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| http://www.english.ohiou.edu/cw/slf_writer/1348 |
At his lecture yesterday, Wolff explained that he never learned anything about writing from pointers. He views "craft" as an internal process. It is, he says, "something you do to yourself over time," a kind of "inner curing."
Wolff asks inspiring writers to think about the writers who make them readers, the writers who make them want to write. "The books we love," he says, "are the best teachers that we have." When I read Sharon Olds' poems in The Dead and the Living when I was an undergraduate in the time of fossils, I knew that my own genre would be poetry. When I later discovered the memoirs of Nancy Mairs, Leonard Kriegel, Scott Russell Sanders, Natalie Kusz, I thought, well, maybe some memoir as well. As I read each of my friend Wendy Mass' novels, I think, that looks like fun, perhaps some young adult fiction? As I dillydally in these various forms, I will do well to recall Wolff's reminder that the process of finding one's literary voice is a slow one, an "incremental" one, and that for writers, the "craft of being patient" is one of the most important crafts of all.
1 comments:
Excellent reminders of what he spoke in his lectures. I found Wolfe to be engaging, energizing, and effulgent as a solar flare. It was like he was striking the chords of inspiration in his lecture and reading. He was brilliant. Thank you again for summarizing this event.
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